Response to: The Importance of Radiation Protection Education and Training for Medical Professionals of All Specialties

Abstract

To the Editor, We read with great interest the article published in CardioVascular and Interventional Radiology (CVIR) titled ‘‘The importance of radiation protection education and training for medical professionals of all specialties’’ [1]. We would like to commend the authors of the paper for emphasising the need for radiation protection (RP) education and training among doctors and for their education programme strategies. In this review, the authors highlight that advancement, increased availability, and enhanced quality of imaging modalities have resulted in increased interventional procedures and therefore, increased radiation exposure (RE) [1]. However, there remains low awareness of RP and so there are high incidences of radiation associated complications for both the patients and the interventionalists [1]. As clinical year medical students, we agree that there is a lack of knowledge surrounding ionising radiation in patient diagnosis and therapy, however, more so amongst junior doctors and medical students. A study conducted by Khan et al. found that foundation year (FY) doctors and final year medical students were the least knowledgeable in terms of radiation legislation and RE, scoring between 12 and 15% lower on average in a 12-question survey compared to radiology specialty trainees [2]. This was a statistically significant result (p-value\\ 0.05) [2]. Furthermore, FY doctors make up the majority of imaging referrers; consequently, their poor understanding of RE and RP can be associated with the overuse of ionising radiation [2, 3]. Therefore, we believe that early RP education as medical students can allow better decision-making and referral choices as a FY doctor and beyond. To address this knowledge gap, medical schools should incorporate RP education into the curriculum, in particular to clinical year students, to allow early awareness of RE and its related harm. Inclusion of RP education in the medical school curriculum was briefly mentioned by the authors, but specific requirements for this category were omitted [1]. In addition to the basic structure outlined by the authors, we suggest, as a minimum, clinical year medical students should have an awareness of: