[ RadSafe ] Fwd: Hospital workers subjected to excessive radiation, lawsuits claim

[Ted de Castro]

No shielding - I doubt it.

When I do a shielding requirement my design limit is and always has been 
- as far back and the mid 70's - 500 mrem/yr for controlled area and 50 
mrem/yr for non controlled areas and almost always the corner of the 
room where the head end is usually tucked requires 6# lead.  The control 
booth is USUALLY much further and ends up with between 2# and 4# (I'd 
have to look up old reports to be sure exactly on that - but the corner 
I am sure of as it stands out).

On 1/21/2014 12:51 PM, Chris Alston wrote:
> Susan
>
> We don't really know the specifics, at this point.  But it was CT,
> not, for instance, interventional radiology, or even a chest x-ray
> room, wherein the pt could have been standing against that wall.
> There is a great deal of inherent shielding of CT scans, and given the
> inverse-square law, it is possible that the output of the shielding
> calculations was: "So, no shielding is required".  Bear in mind, too,
> that the room was likely designed when the limit would have been 500
> mrem/y, not 100.
>
> I know of a hospital at which, back in the 1990's, the x-ray
> technologists refused to work with one (or two, I cannot remember now)
> of the "portable" radiographic machines, because they could get images
> on film via the head leakage.  This machine met the regulatory spec
> for leakage (which I no longer remember).  The manufacturer had tried
> to save some money on shielding, by not kitting it out to
> near-background levels, unlike most other OEM's.  The hospital needed
> the machine in service, for operational flexibility, and, of course,
> there was the investment of das Kapital it represented.  So, the
> manufacturer came up with a custom-retrofit of shielding for the unit.
>
> Cheerfully I await the slings and arrows
> cja
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: S L Gawarecki <slgawarecki at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:57 AM
> Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Hospital workers subjected to excessive
> radiation, lawsuits claim
> To: Franz Schönhofer <franz.schoenhofer at chello.at>
> Cc: "The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing
> List" <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>
> What makes this story even more jaw-dropping is that Methodist Medical
> Center is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the original Manhattan
> Project sites, home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and birthplace of
> health physics.  Of course the facility is in violation of the strict
> standards specified by the state of Tennessee which enforces federal
> requirements in this area.
> This is what can happen when there is no oversight of a contractor's work.
> Someone with a radiation safety background should have verified the
> installation of shielding.
> Regards,
> *Susan Gawarecki*
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