Keywords:
Workforce, Education and training, Safety, Medico-legal issues, Audit and standards, Fluoroscopy, CT, Conventional radiography, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, Radiographers, Quality assurance
Authors:
A. Doyle, J. J. Binghay, R. crawley; Dublin/IE
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-3548
Conclusion
The purpose of this study and audit was to assess the effectiveness of a safety checklist in reducing the misidentification of patients prior to a medical exposure of ionising radiation.
This was anticipated to reduce the number of radiation incidents occurring in a local radiology department in the Republic of Ireland.
Safety checklists and timeouts have proven to improve patient safety.
This has been demonstrated effectively with the World Health Organisation’s theatre time out and checklist and the Society and College of Radiographers,
(SCOR) PAUSED and checked checklist in the medical imaging setting [3][4].
With this in mind a safety checklist was introduced called “Have you Paused and Checked?” which was adapted from SCOR’s Paused and checked checklist.
The word Paused was used as an acronym for the steps which must be carried out pre,
during and post exposure of ionising radiation in the medical field.
Introducing the Paused and Checked checklist proved to reduce misidentification of patients and in turn the number of radiation incidents.
However audits highlighted poor compliance with the patient identification protocol after week 1 of the campaign and this was identified as an area which required improvement as it presented a potential risk for the wrongful exposure of ionising radiation to patients.
Triple ID checks are an important part of a Radiographers job as they are an important element of one of the 3 main principles or radiation safety which is optimisation.
Triple ID checks and other optimisation practices ensure the right patient receives the right examination at the right time [5].To combat the lack of compliance with the triple ID checks a simpler and shorter checklist called the traffic light system was introduced as an initiative to further focus on this area.
The traffic light system was outlined as displayed in Fig (2) follows:
Further audits were carried out after the implementation of the above traffic light system and noted that compliance with the triple ID protocol amongst radiographers improved.
A simpler task proved a higher compliance rate.
Introducing a checklist and creating conversation on the topic has proven to reduce the number of radiation incidents caused by misidentification of patients.
Authors recommend future audits and feedback to stakeholders will be carried out to ensure sustainability.