Welcome to week 5

Hello again and welcome to the final week of this course on radiation protection in dental practice. We end the course by looking at the requirements of the Quality Assurance, or QA, programme that every dental practice must have in place to help it effectively manage the many requirements of IRR17 and IRMER 17. The overall QA programme, which should cover every aspect of radiation protection in the dental practice, can be broken down into the following sections which are covered in detail in chapter 5 of the Dental Guidance Notes. The QA of working procedures and training, QA of X-ray equipment and patient dose, QA of image processing and display equipment, and QA of image quality.

We’ll go through these sections in turn, explaining in each section how the QA procedures contribute to keeping everyone’s doses as low as reasonably practicable. There is plenty of useful practical advice in this week of the course and in the dental GNs which you will hopefully be able to take away and apply in your dental radiography work.