An overview of the use of extremity dosemeters in some European countries for medical applications.

Some medical applications are associated with high doses to the extremities of the staff exposed to ionising radiation. At workplaces in nuclear medicine, interventional radiology, interventional cardiology and brachytherapy, extremities can be the limiting organs as far as regulatory dose limits for workers are concerned. However, although the need for routine extremity monitoring is clear for these applications, no data about the status of routine extremity monitoring reported by different countries was collected and analysed so far, at least at a European level. In this article, data collected from seven European countries are presented. They are compared with extremity doses extracted from dedicated studies published in the literature which were reviewed in a previous publication. The analysis shows that dedicated studies lead to extremity doses significantly higher than the reported doses, suggesting that either the most exposed workers are not monitored, or the dosemeters are not routinely worn or not worn at appropriate positions.