From the October 2020 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

1. It works with HR to curate personnel lists and determine who needs what training.
If a custodian disposes of a gauze pad used with radiation incorrectly, he or she may open the hospital up to a fine for improper waste handling. That employee should understand what should be done and the consequences for not doing so — but may not need a fully structured half-day on the science and mathematics behind the radiopharmaceutical trace found on the gauze. Interventional cardiologists and radiologists, on the other hand, must receive in-depth training about the effects of radiation on tissue, and they should be instructed by experts who can answer their questions.

Some radiation safety partners are now working proactively with a hospital’s human resources department to identify and assign staff to the appropriate level training. Armed with the contact information for each of these employees, the partner will also do the legwork associated with scheduling and tracking completion of the training.
2. It creates educational materials, adapts them to various formats and audiences, and capitalizes on technology to make them as accessible as possible.

Curating personnel lists according to varying levels of training is a waste of time unless you have different trainings on offer. Some partners have the radiation safety expertise and the technological sophistication to create variable content and to break larger chunks of training into shorter, accessible modules. The strongest of these will arrange shorter lectures along a progressive pathway that can be started and stopped at will.

In all cases, the more flexible the platform, the better.

3. It takes on the responsibility to monitor and document who has undergone the required training.
This feature is critical to the risk management aspect of safety training: some partners are now setting up and executing a consistent protocol to get hospital personnel up to speed on safety training. While they won’t have the same ability of the hospital’s oncology or surgery departments to pull physicians into a training, they will, at a minimum, provide the statistics to those departments and the hospitals so they know who needs to be pulled. They can also fulfill the risk management piece by showing, even in the event of an injury, that honest, consistent attempts have been made to educate that clinician about radiation safety.

An example from outside the medical realm shows how the system to ensure that all personnel get trained is as important as the training itself. Body scanners are used in some non-medical environments across the country to detect contraband, such as drugs and weapons. In one instance, a person who received radiation safety training allowed an untrained individual to operate the equipment — a breach of safety protocol that led an advocacy group to force a shutdown of the program. In this case the actual training was robust; it was a failure of certification and monitoring that caused the program to grind to a halt.

Conclusion
While hospital risk managers are dedicated to getting 100% compliance for vital safety training, the first step is to establish a programmatic approach to the training. When that programmatic approach proves difficult to do in-house, outside entities are developing the educational, technological, and reporting systems to fill that need. Acquisition of a platform can also work, provided there is an in-house individual or department that will use it to its fullest capacity. However, a platform and content alone will never serve as true risk management. An organization needs ongoing monitoring — a dynamic and continual process — if it seeks to minimize safety risks and their associated consequences. Contractually engaging an outside entity to ensure execution of a comprehensive training program in radiation safety, with measurable metrics, is a viable alternative to running the program in-house.

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