Planning exercise

We will now introduce a scenario, and you will have an opportunity to test your learning so far with an exercise.

Scenario

You are a dentist, and the owner of a practice that you have decided to relocate to new premises. Your four members of staff will be making the move with you: a practice manager, two registered dental nurses and a trainee dental nurse. You haven’t undertaken any training in radiation protection since you qualified seven years ago. The practice manager has recently taken a course covering the requirements of IRR17 and IRMER17 (similar to this one). One of the registered dental nurses achieved the Certificate in Dental Radiography last year and the other has a general dental nursing qualification and has received in-house training with regard to the use of the digital imaging system. The trainee dental nurse (17 years old) will be starting work as soon as the new practice opens.

You plan to install one intra-oral X-ray set in a surgery at the new practice. In a few months’ time, assuming all goes well at the new premises, you would like to install a new panoramic X-ray set in a separate room.

Below you will find a blank worksheet. Please download this and complete the table to establish what you need to do to comply with both IRR17 and IRMER17 prior to starting work in the new practice. In the comments below let us know what you would highlight as the key pieces of information in this scenario. In the next step we will look at the model answers for the worksheet.