Real-Life Decision Making
It's important to be able to make quick judgment calls when dealing with potentially harmful radioactive materials. Problems rely on your expertise to turn out well. As the specialist responsible for overseeing radiation control, health physicists have to decide how to fix safety problems and how to best approach contamination situations.
"There's a certain amount of judgment in terms of what equipment are you going to use to try and detect what you're looking for," says Paul Mansfeld. He is a radiochemist. "And as far as cleaning radioactive sites, you need to decide how to best clean it to federally mandated levels, whether that be using a cleaning agent or removing the surface."
Federally mandated radiation levels mean certain decisions about safety are already made by federal agencies on behalf of the health physicist. But many other situations, especially those in hospital radiology departments, require health physicists to think independently.
"You have to have good decision-making skills to be effective," says Ken Miller. He is the director of health physics at the Hershey Medical Center. "There are times where you have to make decisions that can have an impact on patients. There are times when you need to do calculations to help doctors determine amounts of radioactive materials to give patients to treat various diseases."
"But most things are much more complicated than looking at a particular number and saying, 'Oh, it means this or that,'" says Genevieve Roessler. She is a retired health physicist.
"There are a lot of factors involved. For instance, if a patient is going in for some medical testing and the doctor prescribes X-rays, the question would come up where someone in our field would act in an advisory position and ask is the person pregnant or not pregnant. If so, how serious is the situation -- are X-rays really required or could another exam that doesn't use radiation be used?"
You're a health physicist working in a hospital radiology department. You've been called on to advise in an area where a woman has come in with a harsh and persistent cough. The doctor thinks it might be a bad strain of bronchitis and wants to do a chest X-ray right away. However, the patient is four months pregnant.
The patient is in dire need of a diagnosis, without which she can't be treated. X-rays are the quickest, cheapest and most conclusive tool the hospital has for diagnosing lung ailments -- the other being magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. X-rays do, however, pose a risk to the baby.
But the doctor thinks the bronchitis has advanced dangerously and doesn't want to wait two days for the results of the MRI.
He says the risk of waiting a day for treatment and permanently damaging her lungs seems just as serious as risking the X-ray's effect on the baby. The patient is also more interested in treatment today than in two days, and has waived the risks.
What do you do?