Congress:
EuroSafe Imaging 2019
Keywords:
Action 4 - Dose management systems, Action 5 - Performance indicators for radiation protection management, Radioprotection / Radiation dose, CT, Radiation safety, Quality assurance
Authors:
R. D. García-Mónaco, D. E. Andisco, S. A. A. Blanco, M. Ulla
DOI:
10.26044/esi2019/ESI-0075
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 patient’s age,
weight,
clinical indication,
etc.) are excellent tools to justify and optimize the use of CT in clinical practice.
Eurosafe Imaging promotes the use of dose management systems to establish local and national DRLs (Action 4) a reasonable tool to check if optimization is correctly achieved clinical practice.
Dose management software supplied by different vendors is usually used for this purpose in many European institutions.
However a local hospital policy precludes the integration of external software in our in-house-developed health information system,
which includes clinical and administrative data.
To overcome this issue it was decided to perform a manual dose management,
while waiting the IT department to develop a self-program to adapt to the local electronic health record (EHR).