Radiation therapy is used in the treatment of approximately 40% to 60% of patients who are diagnosed as having cancer.1,2 Radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation delivered by external beam therapy or radioisotopes with either a palliative or curative goal.1 These complex treatments are usually delivered daily during a period of five to seven weeks.1,2 Radiation therapy is recognized as a high-risk procedure because of the number of steps and staff involved.3 The radiation oncologist, medical physicist, dosimetrist, and radiation therapy technician work in concert to prescribe, plan, and deliver radiation therapy. The goal is to deliver a prescribed dose of radiation to the patient’s tumor site, while restricting the dose to all surrounding healthy tissue and organs to that less than or equal to normal tissue
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When radiation misadministrations are caught early, subsequent treatment doses can be adjusted so that the patient avoids receiving an under- or overdose. A severe misadministration may result in radiation necrosis to vital organs/structures and can be fatal. A highly publicized case of radiation misadministration resulting in a fatality occurred in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2005, in which a young patient, Lisa Norris, received a 58% higher dose than ordered to her craniospinal area. An autopsy revealed that her tumor was still present despite radiation therapy.6 Another example of radiation misadministration involved the Therac-25 incidents, which occurred between 1985 and 1987. Two different computer software errors in a computerized linear accelerator resulted in massive radiation overdoses that injured six patients and caused two
When radiation misadministrations are caught early, subsequent treatment doses can be adjusted so that the patient avoids receiving an under- or overdose. A severe misadministration may result in radiation necrosis to vital organs/structures and can be fatal. A highly publicized case of radiation misadministration resulting in a fatality occurred in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2005, in which a young patient, Lisa Norris, received a 58% higher dose than ordered to her craniospinal area. An autopsy revealed that her tumor was still present despite radiation therapy.6 Another example of radiation misadministration involved the Therac-25 incidents, which occurred between 1985 and 1987. Two different computer software errors in a computerized linear accelerator resulted in massive radiation overdoses that injured six patients and caused two