Quality assurance in diagnostic radiology: practical outcomes.

Over the last four years, our Health Physics Department has implemented a quality control programme focusing on the performance of the diagnostic X-ray machines in use at our hospital. The results of the tests performed (X-ray and light field alignment, tube voltage reproducibility and accuracy, ) were used to compare the 1999 and 2002 findings by means of the chi squared and Fischer statistical tests. The comparison has demonstrated that the decrease in the number of non-conformities, also emerging from a simple comparative analysis on the experimental data, was statistically significant with a p<0.