Short commentary
The Importance of the Y-90 Radiation Safety Time Out
David McKee RSC, Silas Williams, Kenneth Fearn, Adam Alli, Brandon Custer, Zachary Collins*
Department of Radiology, The University of Kansas Hospital, Kansas City, USA
*Corresponding Authour: Zachary Collins, Department of Radiology, The University of Kansas Hospital, Kansas City, U.S.A, E-mail: zcollins@kumc.edu
Citation: Williams S, Fearn K, Alli A, Custer B, Collins Z (2018) The Importance of the Y-90 Radiation Safety Time Out. J Interv Radiol Nucl Med 2018: 51-52
Received Date: 29 September 2018; Accepted Date: 02 October 2018; Published Date: 12 October 2018
In today’s large medical centers, the increased output of interventional procedures has brought the awareness issue of safety to the forefront of all who work in and around the interventional radiology departments. Interventional radiologists at our hospital have the highest occupational radiation exposure of all medical professionals, and their procedures represent the largest contribution of ionizing radiation exposure to patients.
Given these occurrences, the Radiation Safety Departments strive to create policies and training to establish a culture of substantially reducing radiation dose to both patients and staff. One such policy is the Y-90 radiation safety time-out sheet used to confirm and correct any mistakes before the radioembolization begins. The time-out sheet consists of several steps before the start of the procedure:
This intraprocedural radiation safety timeout is the last line of defines before implementation. It has already caught mistakes in action. In a recent example, a verbal review of the patients’ demographics was found to be inconsistent with the expectation of the patients’ body habitus. Review of the Sir Spheres microspheres activity calculator indicated that the patient was 110 kg. Meanwhile, the patient was visibly of quite low body weight and the dose was found to be calculated in kilograms rather than pounds. This would have led to an overdose of Y-90 to the patient. The dose was adjusted accordingly and the proper dose was administered. Additionally, laterality corrections and split dose administrations have been caught in a similar fashion.
Implementation of the radiation safety timeout, especially in high volume radioembolization centers, could significantly reduce procedure errors that could lead to higher radiation exposure to Radiation Safety personnel, staff and most importantly to our patients. It also provides documented information that ensures patients are receiving the best care.
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