Learning from radiation incidents: the new OTHEA website

Abstract

OTHEA is the name of a new website (www.othea.net), created by the Health ProtectionAgency (UK) and the Centre d’étude sur l’évaluation de la protection dans le domainenucléaire (CEPN, France), and supported by several other stakeholders including nationalsocieties and associations. The website is bi-lingual (French and English) and the purposeis to share the lessons learnt from radiological incidents that have occurred inthe industrial, medical, research and teaching, and other non-nuclear sectors.OTHEA contains a collection of incident reports, categorised according to thesector and the type of application, and a search facility. The reports can be freelydownloaded and printed, for example for use in radiation protection training activities.To encourage dissemination, the incident reports have been made anonymous, i.e. anyinformation that could identify a particular individual, organisation or site has beenremoved. Each report contains a brief summary of the incident, the radiologicalconsequences, and the lessons learnt. The aim is not to capture every single incident, but toprovide a range of reports selected according to the value of the lessons learnt.For OTHEA to be a long-term success, it needs to be sustained with new reports.Therefore users are encouraged to submit incident reports that can be considered forinclusion in OTHEA.This note summarises the background to OTHEA, and provides a description of theoperating features and content at its launch in summer 2010.