Welcome to week 4

Hello, everyone. I hope you’re continuing to find this course useful and informative. At this stage, you’ve covered most of the material and should be feeling confident about your understanding of the hazards from dental X-ray equipment, the steps that should be taken to protect the patients and staff, and the core requirements of the radiation protection legislation. Week four now explores the legislation in a little more detail, whereas weeks two and three concentrated on what was needed when setting up a new dental practice or starting work with ionising radiation for the first time. Week four looks at the legal requirements as applied to the routine, day to day work with ionising radiation. These include the following.

From IRR17, some of the important outcomes of the risk assessment, in particular the designation of controlled areas, assessing doses for staff and measuring radiation levels in controlled areas, local rules and contingency plans, and the role of the radiation protection supervisor. From IRMER17, we’ll cover the employer’s procedures that need to be drafted and put into place, the need for referral criteria, and the process for justifying and authorising patients’ exposures, and the role that diagnostic reference levels, or DRLs, play in helping optimise patient doses. In the next and final week of the course, we’ll look at the various requirements of the quality assurance programme that dental practices must have in place.