The Blue Ribbon Panel on Fluoroscopy Safety: AHRA Member Contributions Leading Us Into the Future of Safer Imaging (Established Leaders Session)

We will discuss the objectives and efforts of the ACR-convened Blue Ribbon Panel on Fluoroscopy Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaboration featuring representation from several medical imaging societies, regulatory advisory groups, and professional organizations, including the AHRA whom the speaker is representing. The BRP has been charged with several tasks, one of which is to propose courses of action to improve the safety of fluoroscopy patients and users and to help standardize minimum expectations for safe fluoroscopy practice across the United States. AHRA membership has provided valuable input via the online forum. This talk will highlight those contributions in light of the BRP’s effort to produce a white paper containing simple recommendations for the optimization of fluoroscopy safety. This guidance can be adopted and implemented in any clinical setting where fluoroscopy imaging is used. We will also discuss the importance of the role that radiology administrators and managers may have in promoting a culture of fluoroscopy safety once the BRP white paper is published. This role may include leveraging published guidance on operator credentialing and hands-on training to craft sensible policies to help affect change in departments that extend beyond Radiology, where knowledge of standard radiation safety practices may be limited. In many ways, the Medical Physics 3.0 initiative runs parallel to the work being done by the BRP, so we also will briefly touch on where the two overlap. It is the hope of the BRP that the forthcoming publication will help equip imaging management leaders with valuable tools and information concerning fluoroscopic radiation and to spark close collaboration with physicists, technologists, nurses, and physicians as we seek to improve fluoroscopy safety for all.

Speaker: Richard R. Miguel, MS, DABR, New England Regional Director & Chief Medical Physicist of West Physics

This activity has been approved for 1.0 Category A ARRT continuing education credit.