Welcome to week 3

Hello again. You’ve now completed the first two weeks of the course, and we’re hoping that you’re finding it enjoyable and interesting. At this stage, you’ve already learned about the nature and hazards of X-radiation, radiation doses and how we measure them, what we can do to protect people from radiation exposure, and the equipment used in dental radiography. We’ve also introduced the main requirements of legislation that’s in place to protect people who work with ionising radiation and those who undergo medical exposures to ionising radiation.

The theme of week three is practical protection from X-radiation, and so we’ll now return to look at X-ray sets and ancillary equipment in a bit more detail, focusing on the features that provide much of the radiation protection needs of patients. We’ll then take a look at the working procedures that support these physical protection measures before discussing the personal protective equipment, or PPE, that’s available to protect patients from exposure to X-radiation and when its use is and isn’t appropriate. Having looked at the protection of patients, we’ll then turn our attention to the radiation protection needs of dental staff.

To an extent, this relies on the radiation protection measures for patients being effective, but other factors are also important here, including the design features of rooms containing X-ray equipment. Working procedures are important for the radiation safety of staff, too, and these will be discussed before rounding off the week with an article on PPE and when staff should use it.