Project 2. Exposure levels and health effects among vascular interventionists and nuclear medicine workers
Project Lead: Richard Haylock (UKHSA)
Project Team: Lefteris Livieratos (KCL), Samantha Terry (KCL), Bijan Modarai (KCL)
Recently, concerns have been raised by several publications about radiation health effects among health care workers such as vascular interventionalists and nuclear medicine workers. To date, there has been no long-term study of these workers similar to that of the industrial workers in the NRRW. When NRRW was set up in the 1970’s it did not include health care workers as the perception at the time was that the monitoring of the workers radiation exposure was not sufficiently good to justify their inclusion.
With an improved focus on occupational health and safety, we believe that has now changed and, in this project, we aim to expand the NRRW to include individually monitored health care workers.
The focus of the work will be to evaluate the health of interventionalists (vascular and cardiology) and nuclear medicine workers in relation to the occupational radiation exposure with particular attention to younger female operators.
Years 1 and 2 aims:
- Identify the UK hospital trusts that have the greatest number of workers who are likely to have the greatest radiation exposure.
- Approach these Trusts (via the main Trust Boards) and seek their agreement to participate in the NRRW and obtain a data sharing agreement with them.
- Having obtained data sharing agreements approach the trusts dosimetry service to start the flow of data about the trusts radiation workers into the NRRW.
