AN INDEPENDENT CHECK OF TREATMENT PLAN, PRESCRIPTION AND DOSE CALCULATION AS A QA PROCEDURE

In many radiotherapy centres where planning for external beam treatmen ts is performed by radiation therapists, the treatment sheet and its c alculations are independently checked by staff from a different educat ional background, typically a radiotherapy physicist. The benefits of this practice were evaluated in a radiotherapy department with two lin ear accelerators, one combined superficial-orthovoltage unit and one t elecaesium unit. Within the 19 months of the investigation period, 232 8 checks were performed on the treatment sheets of 1579 patients. In s ix cases, errors in excess of 5% were detected, which if uncorrected, could potentially have affected local tumour control or caused normal tissue complications. It was found that an independent check of treatm ent sheets assists in keeping these errors as low as can be achievable in clinical practice, and suggests that treatment sheet checking and in vivo dosimetry play a complementary role in this aim. Independent t reatment sheet checking is an important quality assurance (QA) activit y, with additional advantages such as improved communication in the de partment, education of staff and in vivo dosimetry targeting. Therefor e the advantages of the procedure seem to outweigh the additional work load of approximately 0.3 full-time staff per 1000 patients per year. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.