AN ASSESSMENT OF FINGER DOSES RECEIVED BY STAFF WHILE PREPARING AND INJECTING RADIOPHARMACEUTICALS

Good working practice and legal obligation impose a duty on nuclear. m edicine departments to check syringe activities before administration to a patient. If syringe guards are used to reduce staff exposure whil e drawing up injections, the guard has to be removed to measure the ac tivity in a conventional reentrant ionization chamber type calibrator. Alternatively the activity may be checked in a purpose-built syringe calibrator which allows the assay of the activity in the syringe witho ut the need to remove the syringe guard. Finger doses received during the dose preparation and injection are a cause for concern. This study investigated the finger and whale-body doses received when using each of these calibrators, and compared the results with those obtained by an operator who did not measure the dose at all. The results demonstr ated that although the finger doses are small, measurement of the syri nge activities in a conventional ionization chamber increases the dose by a factor of 2 above that which would occur if no activity measurem ents were made, whereas the use of the specialized syringe calibrator gave finger doses only marginally above those obtained with no activit y measurement.