Re: Dosimetry

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 05:20 PM 2/14/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Remember that in the decrease in frequency processing, essentially
>service stays the same, processing procedures stay the same, badge late
>fees are incurred (monthly and quarterly), dose reports decrease, and
>service decreases.

A relevant point here is that most of the items mentioned above are fixed
cost items, and they seem to have gotten lost in this discussion.

Most of the cost of operating a dosimetry program has nothing to do with
the length of the monitoring period. The number of readers needed to
process the dosimeters in the time alloted is the same whether the period
is monthly or quarterly. Same for the number of people required to get the
processing done, the computers that control laboratory processes, the
software for process control - these all cost the same no matter how often
they are exercised. The software that prints the dose reports costs the
same to develop whether it is run monthly or quarterly. The reduction in
expense for paper that comes from switching to quarterly is a small
fraction of the overall cost of doing dosimetry. 

A dosimetry company is like any other service company - it has to generate
enough income when it provides its services to survive and therefore be
available to provide the service again in the future. Services obviously
can survive on the income from monthly processing, but cutting that income
substantially because of a switch to quarterly processing can't work
(unless the company was doing monthlies at an enormous profit and can
afford to absorb the drop in income despite having the same capital
investment and labor costs). Three months of work has to generate enough
income to keep the company running for three months; a change from monthly
badging to quarterly really cannot be expected to make a huge difference in
the quarterly cost to the customer.

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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