Improvements in Radiation Monitoring Trending

Abstract: One of the main goals for Radiation Safety Professionals is to help maintain radiation worker doses below administrative control levels. In the radiation safety field there is an increasing recognition of the value of dosimetry-related data that can be used to enhance safety programs and regulatory compliance. Mining radiation dosimetry data and rendering results in the form of dashboards provides insights for the Radiation Safety Professionals that could help improve the radiological protection programs effectiveness, enhances quality, and reduces cost. Quite often the professionals spend more time assembling data than analyzing for trends and acting to improve the radiation safety program. Data analysis tools were developed allowing the radiation safety professionals to perform surveillance on key parameters in the dosimetry program that can help identifying risks and insure early intervention. More than 2,200 institutions chosen from different industries were surveyed for more than 2 years after the implementation of this tool. Four indicators: dose per participant, collective dose, dosimeter return compliance, and number of workers exceeding ALARA levels were chosen as meaningful parameters in characterizing the health of the program. These parameters were tracked, analyzed, and compared to benchmarks developed based on more than 1 million monitored workers.

Source: Health Physics - November 8, 2017 Category: Radiology Tags: Operational Topic Source Type: research