Medical physics: Service for radiology

Medical Radiation Protection Ordinance: New requirements for radiology

The Medical Radiation Protection Ordinance (MedStrSchV, BGBl. II Nr. 375/2017) involves new requirements for your radiology work. The most significant change is that medical physicists must be involved in dose optimization and quality assurance for radiation diagnostic and interventional radiological procedures with high patient doses (§ 22 Abs. 1 MedStrSchV).
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The requirements at a glance

All high-dose applications, such as those used in interventional radiology, nuclear medicine, computer tomography and radiotherapy, are affected (§ 11 Abs. 1 MedStrSchV). In these areas, medical physicists must be entrusted with the following tasks (§ 23 Abs. 2 MedStrSchV):

• Optimization of radiation protection
• Quality assurance for radiological devices
• Verification of compliance with diagnostic reference values
• Acceptance tests of radiological equipment
• Selection of radiological and radiation protection devices with regard to technical specifications
• Analysis of events with actual or potential accidental medical exposure including dose determination or dose estimation
• Radiation protection training for employees

The optimization of processes for high-dose applications aims to reduce the exposure of patients and radiology professionals.