use of contract HP services

[JGinniver@AOL.COM]

Hi,

       I work for a large organisation in the UK and have been asked to look into the experience of other organisations in the use of contract HP personnel.  I would be grateful if anyone with experince of either using contract HP services or working as a contractor providing HP services could provide a brief summary of thier expereince of the process and whether it works satisfactorily.  


We currently use external contractors to provide the following services on our sites in the UK.


a)  Internal, external, emergency dosimetry and record keeping ( the supplier of these services has been approved by the UK regulator, Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, as reqired by UK legislation).  

b) provision of all health physics technicians (surveyors/monitors in UK parlance) and supervisory staff.

c)  provision of additional Heath Physicists/radiological engineers/criticality experts to support the companies own core team of Radiological Protection professionals.

d)  provision of health physics instrument maintenance and calibration services.


I'm interested in whether any organisation elsewhere in the world contract out as much of their core HP services as we do at the moment.  My understanding is that in Power Plants, contract HP personnel are mostly limited to Overhaul/outage/shutdown work or specific major projects e.g. large scale refurbishment projects or decommissioning.  In large government organisation e.g. the DoE, the whole site management organisation is contracted out rather than just parts of the organisation e.g. HP services.  The contractor is then reviewed by an oversight team from the DoE, or am I just mistaken?  Universities and research establishments rely on in-house Hp teams.


I would be grateful for any information that list members may be able to supply.  Please reply to me off list, and I will try and summarise the comments I recieve at the end and post to the list, unless there are issues or information that you feel the list would like to hear first.


Regards

       Julian Ginniver