Submitted by Sharan Packer, UK Society for Radiological Protection Commenting on behalf of the organisation
SRP welcomes the opportunity to comment on this draft publication. The comments are the collated views of SRP members/committees. General comments are given below. The accompanying spread sheet contains comments on specific items within the document.
Since the scope of the document is digital radiology consider whether there is too much emphasis on comparison with film-screen and are such comparisons still relevant.
The report needs to be updated with gender-inclusive language. There are some inconsistencies in terminology used particularly in relation to the descriptions of healthcare personnel involved in digital radiology, their roles and the make up of “teams” throughout eg. “clinician”, “physician”, radiologist”, “interventionalist”, “interventional proceduralists”, or “medical physicists”, “hospital medical physicists”, “medical radiation physicists”. It’s unclear if/whether these are used interchangeably. Some but not all of these inconsistencies have been highlighted in the attached spread sheet containing specific comments. It is suggested that wherever possible generic role descriptors should be used and specific titles such as radiologist, radiographer etc avoided.
Additionally, there is no distinction between medical physicists and qualified experts as provided for by the IAEA BSS (MPEs in the UK).
Membership of optimisation teams is too narrow (needs to include senior managers and clinical leads, non-radiographer operators and others rather than just radiologists, radiographers and medical physicists). The importance of a professional relationship in all team members of the optimisation team cannot be emphasised enough, optimisation is a team effort
There is no discussion as to how priorities for optimisation should be set. It isn’t clear how the guidance enables optimisation processes to mature as illustrated (from D to A)