South Eastern Trust’s Nuclear Medicine Team is thrilled after becoming the first team in the United Kingdom to navigate the newly implemented Health and Safety Executive NI (HESENI) Consent application process.
The process, which has taken over a year to accomplish, is required for departments using radioactive materials and was recently updated by the HSENI to become more rigorous. It involved a submission of a detailed Safety Assessment, a comprehensive review of documentation by the inspection team and an on-site inspection.
Nuclear Medicine is a branch of Radiology, where patients at the Ulster Hospital are injected with radioactive materials and imaged on a special camera, called a ‘gamma camera’. This imaging allows doctors to assess an organ’s function or structure and to track, diagnose or treat disease. The use of this radioactive material means that the staff in Nuclear Medicine have to follow rules and regulations unique to their environment, in order to keep themselves and everyone else, safe.
Trust Lead for Nuclear Medicine Donna Rowley explained how “nerve wracking” it was to discover that the team, “were the first in the UK to undertake this new process as we had nothing to benchmark against.”
“Nuclear Medicine is a very strictly regulated environment, so its managers are no strangers to inspections and oversight. We have frequent visits from inspectors and are very used to reviewing our procedures and processes,” said Donna.
Donna continued, “We had to thoroughly interrogate every single task we undertake to ensure it was as safe as it could be, right from the moment our drivers received our radioactive material, to its arrival and use in our department and then it’s onward journey through the surgical environment via our patients. The result of this inspection process is an even safer environment and it improved the already robust procedures within the South Eastern Trust, across a very varied multi-disciplinary team, putting radiation safety at the forefront of people’s minds.
“The staff in Nuclear Medicine would like to acknowledge the support they received from the Trust teams in Transport, Theatres, Estates, Access Control, and also their Specialist Adviser to get this achievement across the line!”