Today we’re scheduled to spend a whole day on radiotherapy machine quality assurance (QA), performing the monthly checks on a particular machine to ensure that we are operating within the approved procedures with which we’re allowed to carry out radiotherapy. These checks include mechanical checks of the couch positioning and isocentres (laser, mechanical, radiation), dosimetric checks such as looking at the treatment beam profile and image guided checks including checking that the cone beam CT images are of high enough quality to be clinically acceptable.
Anything out of tolerance will require a permit, signed by the head of department to enable the machine to continue in clinical use. This permit will include a justification of continuing to use the machine and an assessment of the clinical effect. Anything that requires immediate attention will cause the machine to be pulled out of clinical use immediately.
This morning’s radiographer QA checks have pulled up an action serious enough that treatments cannot be given on this machine until the action has been fixed. This means patients scheduled to be treated on this machine have to be transferred to other machines due to the time critical nature of administering radiotherapy (where patients have been following instructions for bladder filling etc). This also means that Physics QA is delayed until the department is back to having all machines being operational. As with everything in healthcare science, the clinical needs of the patients come first!
"You're obviously not a scientist" 