Quality assurance in radiotherapy: evaluation of errors and incidents recorded over a 10 year period.

Background And Purpose: To establish an incident reporting system to (1) record and classify incidents, (2) assess the impact of incidents on patients in terms of dose errors, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of the quality assurance checking program implemented at the Radiation Treatment Program at the Northeastern Ontario Regional Cancer Centre (NEORCC).

Materials And Methods: An 'incident' is defined as an event or a series of events that has led to, or would have led to if undiscovered, dose errors to a patient undergoing radiation therapy treatment. The incidents reported between November 1992 and December 2002 were analyzed according to their source of error, stage of discovery and dose errors.