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Should Radiation Be Pregnant Women's Pregnancy?

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“Any chance that you may be pregnant? When was your last menstrual cycle?” These are critical questions that need to be asked within the imaging department. Radiation is not something that should be taken lightly. Radiation is when energy is emitted as a wave or particle that causes ionization. Ionizing radiation is what we are worried about especially for women during pregnancy. Only one cell has to be hit by radiation to cause a detrimental effect to a person. So you can see how important it is to try and keep pregnant mothers away from imaging departments in the healthcare field. The question is how much of a risk is it actually causing the patient when they are pregnant and coming into contact with radiation? How often does it actually …show more content…

She should declare her pregnancy as soon as she finds out so her superiors and radiation safety officer can work out a plan for her so she has extra precautions against accidental exposures. “In a case where the pregnant mother worked in a radiation field the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) recommends that there is an exposure limit of 0.5 rem for a radiologic technologist over the course of her pregnancy.”3 The tech can be placed in a different department where she can avoid higher exposures like portable exams, surgery, fluoroscopic exams, or interventional procedures. The tech should always be wearing a lead apron if there is a possibility of any radiation. She should also get a separate badge that she can wear at abdomen level under her lead apron. This shows how much radiation that fetus actually receives. The technologist also needs to always consider the cardinal rules, which are time, distance, and …show more content…

With intentional exposures comes many thoughts and questions on why. First off, the medical physicist should justify whether or not the exam is needed, risks versus benefits. Then they should communicate this with the patient. Communicating with the patient can be hard. They need to fully understand the risks that may come out of having the exposure. Then the exam needs to executed perfectly for optimization of the exposure, no repeats should be taken. 5 They need to have a small exposure time and appropriate exposure factors. The primary beam should be pointing away from the fetus if there is any way possible and restricting/collimating the beam size as much as possible.6It is very important to get the patient positioned just perfect the first time. It is also very important to collimate just enough and not too much because then you are defeating the purpose. You are actually giving the patient more radiation because something was clipped out of the image that needed to be there if you collimate too

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