From the March 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

In January 2008, when the Alliance for Radiation Safety in Pediatric Imaging and the first Image Gently Campaign were officially launched, many of us hoped that they would have the desired effect of promoting a thoughtful and insightful approach to the imaging of children, maximizing diagnostic information while minimizing radiation. However, I think the most sanguine among us would have been surprised had we glimpsed at that time the tremendous influence that this campaign would have, not just in changing practice, but in putting the radiologists in the command center of managing the contemporaneous radiation issues that had come to dominate the conversation in the medical/scientific and lay communities.


10 years of education and outreach
The first campaign targeted CT, at that time responsible for a large portion of patient exposure, and growing at a rapid pace that at times seemed difficult to defend. The ability of the Image Gently logo, a child’s hand holding a butterfly, to capture the minds and hearts of the public, and to convey at a glance the message of the Alliance, was obvious from the first. The Alliance did not say, “Don’t Image.” Instead the message was to “Image Gently.” Similarly, who could forget the image of the poster child at the edge of the beach with too large a life jacket, and the simple mantra, “Be wise, adjust for size?”

The Alliance has had additional campaigns addressing fluoroscopy in interventional radiology (Step Lightly), in diagnostic radiology (Pause and Pulse), which was granted the Aunt Minnie award for best marketing campaign in 2011, and in conventional radiography (Back to Basics), which generated a consensus committee of ACR, SPR and AAPM members partnering with industry to create optimal exposure parameters for digital radiography in children.

The Alliance has worked with dentists and national and international dental organizations to shed light on the practice of dental radiography, and through the Dose Optimization Task Force has also reviewed nuclear medicine doses, publishing North American Consensus Guidelines for pediatric radiopharmaceuticals. Five years after its founding, the Steering Committee of the Alliance published a self-analysis, reviewing the goals that the Alliance had set for itself and to analyze the level of success attained. Among the goals within each of those campaigns was the provision of information to parents, referring physicians, radiologists and technologists, which is accomplished through the rich content on its website and multiple external links.

March 2018 Magazine

Read more stories from the March 2018 issue

CT Homepage