Abstract

Certain medical examinations or treatments, such as CT scans and image guided interventions, involve the use of ionising radiation. Although radiation can help detect diseases, it also entails a slightly higher risk of the patient developing cancer. This makes it important to balance the pros and cons of procedures involving radiation carefully. For this reason, RIVM annually estimates the average dose of radiation to which the Dutch population is exposed to . This involves gathering information about the radiation dose per examination or treatment. This dose information was last gathered, manually and on a small scale, in 2002 and 2010.

RIVM has conducted a pilot study in 15 hospitals to investigate a more structured way to gather new dose information. The hospitals collated information about 48 types of radiological examinations and interventions. To obtain this information, hospitals commonly use automated dose management systems, which gather a significant amount of information about each examination. The pilot study yielded many insights into the effective gathering of dose information. These insights will be used as input for a follow-up study.

For most examination types, the newly obtained dose values turned out to be lower than the old ones. This suggests that hospitals have optimised their examinations in recent years. However, it is not possible to estimate the average radiation dose to the Dutch population from this information, because the 15 hospitals are not representative of all hospitals in the Netherlands.

Moreover, it is difficult to compare examinations between hospitals, for instance because one hospital takes more photos during a particular type of examination than another. Another complicating factor is that hospitals store protocols under different names. A nationwide digital system for the storage of data information, with naming conventions for examination types, would make it easier to gather and analyse dose values.

As an added benefit of the pilot study, hospitals were able to compare their results with each other. This may encourage them to review certain protocols and optimise the radiation dose.
RIVM conducted this pilot study on behalf of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. As a result of the Radiation Protection (Basic Safety Standards) Decree, the Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport is responsible for individual dose estimates from medical exposure for radiodiagnostic and interventional radiology.