Quality standards in radiation medicine.

Purpose: Identifying and conducting "best practice" medicine is arguably the ubiquitous goal of practitioners. However, to distill the many available quality standards, guidelines, recommendations, and indicators down to a best practice set requires a logical schema to group standards addressing similar quality issues and, from manageable lists of related standards, to extract the essential dimensions of quality. The purpose of this study was to explore a method of collating publicly available quality standards, in this case in radiation therapy, using a 2-step decision tree approach with statistical analysis.

A Practice-based Taxonomy for Radiation Treatment Errors.

Purpose: An absence of a common language for incident classification limits knowledge sharing within and between organizations in the radiotherapy community. This challenge provided the motivation to develop a clinically relevant taxonomy for radiotherapy errors.

Materials And Methods: This was a multicenter, prospective study that consisted of three phases: (1) an initial version of the taxonomy was developed based on the World Health Organization Conceptual Framework for the International Classification for Patient Safety and taxonomy models from radiotherapy and other industries; (2) the taxonomy was evaluated using actual incident data from a single practitioner and revised; and (3) face validity testing of the taxonomy was performed by two additional practitioners from different radiotherapy centers using simulated incident cases.

Factors Influencing Radiation Therapists' Perceptions of Performing Manual Monitor Unit Calculations in a Computer-Based Work Environment.

Introduction: Despite increased automation in the field of radiation therapy, the need to perform monitor unit calculations manually still exists for a small number of clinical situations. Challenges in maintaining the skill of performing infrequently occurring clinical tasks have been identified among other health professions, but no study has been performed for similar issues in radiation therapy. The aim of this study was to explore radiation therapists' (RT) perceived changes in comfort level to perform manual calculations (MC), an infrequently occurring clinical task, and to evaluate factors that may have influenced the change in comfort level.