Medical and Dental
 

COMARE 12th Report: The impact of personally initiated X-ray computed tomography scanning for the health assessment of asymptomatic individuals - Press release 19 December 2007 COMARE site
Report pdf 550KB COMARE site
Extract: There is a regulatory requirement that all medical exposures using ionising radiation should be referred, justified and optimised. Referral and justification must be carried out by registered healthcare professionals. Justification of any medical exposure should be based on the scientific evidence available. There is little evidence that demonstrates, for whole body CT scanning, the benefit outweighs the detriment. We recommend therefore that services offering whole body CT scanning of asymptomatic individuals should stop doing so immediately. Where scans are offered for a number of discrete anatomical regions within a single scanning procedure, the advertising should clearly state which regions are examined and for which conditions the scan is optimised. In CT scanning it is not possible to optimise exposure parameters for scans of the whole of the body.
HPA Press Statement HPA site

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NHS - Making the Change: A Strategy for the Professions in Healthcare Science (pdf)

Population Exposure from Medical X-rays in UK Remains Constant but Contribution from Computed Tomography Doubles NRPB site accessed 30 Aug 2004
A total of about 41.5 million x-ray examinations are now conducted each year (0.7 examination per head of population). This results in an annual per caput effective dose of 330 microSv, which is not significantly different from the estimated figure in the early 1990s2. However, over the last ten years, CT has more than doubled its contribution and is now responsible for 40% of the total dose to the population from medical x-rays (despite being only 4% of the total number of examinations). In contrast, the contribution to dose from conventional radiographic and fluoroscopic examinations has nearly halved to about 44%. New report: D Hart and B F Wall: Radiation Exposure of the UK Population from Medical and Dental X-ray Examinations. (NRPB-W4, 2002). £10.00 (ISBN 0-85951-468-4) - NRPB press release P5/02 15 April 2002

Radiological Accident at National Oncology Institute in Panama

Dental Radiography

Guidance Notes for Dental Practitioners on the Safe Use of X-ray Equipment, June 2001 NRPB site (pdf 335KB Help) accessed 12 Jan 2002
Drafted by a working party representing: British Dental Association, British Society of Dental and Maxillofacial Radiology, Royal College of Radiologists, Faculty of General Dental Practitioners (UK) of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Health and Safety Executive, Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, National Radiological Protection Board.

Response to discussion on the justification of dental radiography by Peter Hirschmann, Leeds Dental Institute, member of the Guidance Notes working party who represented RCR and BSDMFR, 30 August 2001, JISCmail site