Background/introduction
In many developing countries there is not full awareness of medical radiation hazards.
The trend towards a better comprehension of radioprotection (RP) in health care,
especially after the Bonn Call for Action, encouraged some hospitals to address this issue.
Following the Eurosafe Imaging recommendations,
several actions to improve radiation quality and safety (Q&S) were addressed in our Hospital.
Justification and optimization in the use of Computed Tomography (CT) are recommendations of outmost importance.
Clinical decision support and the application of specific CT protocols (related to...
Description of activity and work performed
Setting
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires (HIBA) is a non-profit healthcare academic tertiary center with 785 beds,
of which 200 are dedicated to critical care.
The hospital has a busy clinical practice with 3 millions outpatient consultations,
45000 inpatient admissions and 52000 surgeries performed in 41 operating rooms,
yearly.
During 2018,
the Imaging Department received 583,455 patients to perform different studies (table 1).
Since 1998,
the HIBA has run an in-house-developed health information system,
which includes clinical and administrative data.
It has been recently certified...
Conclusion and recommendations
Dose management system to establish local,
national or continental DRLs as a tool for monitoring the CT doses to patients,
is recommended by Eurosafe Imaging (Action 4).
Although automatic softwares for dose management are available,
the acquisition or integration to the EHR in some South America hospitals may be troublesome.
A manual dose management system,
although time consuming,
may be used as an alternative.
A medical physicist is of outmost importance if a manual dose management system is implemented.
Personal/organisational information
R.
D.
García-Mónaco: Head of the Imaging Department,
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires.
D.
E.
Andisco: medical physicist.
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires.
S.
A.
Blanco: medical physicist.
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires.
M.
Ulla: chief quality officer of the Imaging department of Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires,
coordinating activities of the audit team in the radiology department.
References
1.- AAPM Report N° 204 – “Size-Specific Dose Estimates (SSDE) in pediatric and Adult Body CT Examinations” – 2011.
2.- Radiation Protection N°185 - “European Guidelines on Diagnostic reference Levels for Paediatric Imaging” – 2018 – ISSN 2315-2826
3.- ICRP Publication 135: Diagnostic Reference Levels in Medical Imaging.
- 2017