Xray Safety

There has been some concern about nurse and patient radiation exposure from xrays taken post operatively in the PACU.
Last week, Henry Sinn, Director of Medical Imaging spoke to a few of the nurses working on MGround. To make a long story short, he was adamant that xrays were of negligible safety concern for nurses and patients in a common room where xrays were being taken. Basically, the cassette that the xray is placed in absorbs 85% of the rays. Safe xray practice includes keeping minimally 3 feet away from the patient during xray, and keeping out of direct line of the xray shot. The xray tech also centres the picture on the patient area to be xrayed so that as many of the radiation rays are absorbed on the cassette. Henry said that the techs and RN's actually do receive scattered radiation from the patient after the xray has been taken as the patient naturally absorbs some of the radiation. For portable xrays, the cardinal time is 0.1 seconds of exposure.
There was a research test done in CrCU in 2005 where volunteer nurses offered to wear radiation tags for 6 months, with readings taken after each 3 months. The amount of radiation exposure was negligible. (The research was done there because daily CXR are done on all patients every morning and the RN's were concerned about their exposure.) A millisevert is a measure of radiation dose. The radiation dose from one chest x-ray is approximately one-tenth of a millisevert. (It is to be noted that the RN or xray tech would not receive this one-tenth millisevert because they are not the ones receiving the xray.) 5 milliseverts is the limit for non-radiation workers ie nurses. The xray techs' limit is 50. Henry noted that the xray techs all wear the radiation tags and every three months they get turned in to Health Canada to have their values checked. All have been reported with negligible results.
Interesting to note, that there is a certain amount of environmental exposure to background radiation that we all normally absorb from everyday things such as TV, computer, cell phones, microwaves etc.
For more information, and to find out what your background radiation level is, check this out:

Xray Safety Theory and Practice Medical Site

A little Trivia Pursuit:
1 CT scan can generate as much radiation as 100-300 xrays
1.5 hours on a plane is equivalent to 1 CXR (from cosmic rays!)

Since this was a post about safety, I thought I'd use this opportunity to point you in another safety direction. When you are at a Sunnybrook computer, check out the Occupational Health & Safety bulletin for some FYI.