Matherial and Methods
Starting from 1995 Interdisciplinary Working Groups (WGs) on Quality Assurance in radiotherapy and nuclear medicine have been constituted and coordinated by ISS.
Later,
similar activities on radiodiagnostics,
teleradiology,
interventional radiology, were carried out jointly with INAIL,
by involving all professionals delegated by National Scientific Societies to analyze and face criticities to provide national guidelines. WGs promoted education and training by organizing courses and debates on the main critical topics in the framework of Continuous Quality Improvement.
Experts from ISS have been involved in drafting European Commission Guidelines on Clinical Audit for Medical Radiological Practices (Diagnostic Radiology,
Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy) (4).
Clinical audit have also been undertaken in Italy,
as pilot study with the aim of developing and testing performance indicators to make available for scientific community (3).
Recently,
our activity has mainly devoted to interventional radiology to identify criticities due to the heterogeneity of procedures and high dose values used in this field,
where patient and worker exposures are closely related. That’s why,
it is certainly important to promote a cultural awareness within the structures of the National Health Service to optimize and standardize interventional radiology procedures.
Our golden goal is then to minimize risks and maintain a low incidence of complications.
Therefore,
ISS and INAIL started in 2013 a coordination activity of a WG of experts to elaborate operational guidelines with a multidisciplinary approach to optimize patient and worker radiation protection in IR procedures.
All professionals have been involved (Physicians,
Medical Physics Expert,
Radiation Protection Expert,
Radiographers,
Nurses).
Eleven Scientific National Societies have been asked to partecipate (Fig.
2).
Fig. 2: National Scientific Societies partecipating to the Working Group on Quality Assurance in interventional radiology.
A first national document "Indicazioni operative per l’ottimizzazione della radioprotezione nelle procedure di radiologia interventistica" ("Operational Indications for radiation protection optimization in interventional radiology procedures") has been published as Rapporto ISTISAN 15/41 (Fig.
3) and is available at http://www.iss.it/binary/publ/cont/15_41_web.pdf. An english paper on this topic is foreseen for 2016.
Fig. 3: Cover of ISTISAN Report 15/41
The Working Group composition is reported in Personal/Organizational Section.