Standards

1. How can professional bodies participate in the regulatory process?
2. Can an examination be conducted without a prescription from a medical practitioner? BSS II.1(a)
3. Is advice from qualified experts in radiodiagnostic physics required? For what purpose? BSS II.2
4. What are the requirements for, and what guidance is available to help medical practitioners justify the exposure? BSS II.4-5
5. Who has the primary responsibility for ensuring overall radiological protection of patients? BSS I.1 (b)
6. Are there requirements to justify exposures for:
   1. Legal, health insurance and occupational purpose? BSS II.6
   2. Mass screening of population? BSS II.7
   3. Exposures of humans for research? BSS II.8
   4. Exposure for theft detection purpose? BSS II.9
7. As an employer, what are my responsibilities? BSS I.5 to I.9 and BSS II.15 and II.16
8. What actions are needed in the event of non-compliance? BSS I.11

1. How can professional bodies participate in the regulatory process?

Proactive involvement of the professional bodies in the process of establishing standards and regulations and in their application produces a number of benefits. Not only does it minimize the need for enforcement actions to ensure compliance, but also more importantly, it ensures a better understanding of radiation protection requirements and improves safety for patients. Professionals should be made aware of their responsibilities on the overall patient protection and safety in the prescription of and during the delivery of medical exposure. Professional bodies can contribute to this end, by:

• Actively participating upon request in reviewing and giving advice to national authorities in the preparation of regulations.
• Working with authorities in developing or adopting training and accreditation (or certification) criteria with regard to radiation protection matters [BSS II.1 (f)] and in providing education, training and professional development.
• Developing or adopting appropriateness criteria for the use of X rays in diagnostic and interventional radiology, i.e., justification of generic procedures in general, and providing advice to its member radiologists on how to justify the exposure of individual patients where needed [BSS II.4 to 9].
• Providing guidelines for Ethical Review Committees on biomedical research involving the exposure of humans [BSS II.8] and providing advice on dose constraints to be applied on a case by case basis in the optimization of protection for persons exposed for medical research purposes if such medical exposure does not produce direct benefit to the exposed individual [BSS II.26].
• Working with manufacturers and medical physicists in establishing radiation protection criteria for radiological equipment, including the recording of data relevant for assessing patient exposure, and ensuring that instructions for use of equipment are given in a language acceptable to the users, as well as providing advice on matters of equipment maintenance and malfunction [BSS II.13].
• Developing or adopting recommendations on criteria for acceptable image quality [BSS II.16].
• Establishing guidance levels on patient exposure, by providing advice to authorities on methods of surveying patient doses and deriving guidance levels and participating in them and in evaluating the results [BSS II.27 and BSS II.24-25].
• Developing or adopting typical protocols for quality assurance and quality control and make it available to registrants/licensees and medical practitioners and qualified experts [BSS II.20].

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