Quality assurance and quality control at dose calibrator to support nuclear medicine services

Abstract

One of the most important factors in health services is the quality and speed of service. However, the speed of service must be supported by the quality of service. Quality is often used as a benchmark and differentiator for a health service. Therefore, all producers and providers of health services must looking for ways to maintain and improve their quality. In this paper quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) will be presented at the dose calibrator (DC) to support nuclear medicine services. DC is a very useful tool for measuring radiopharmaceutical activity / dose (which will be given to patients) for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. For accurate measurements, DC must be calibrated routinely, must pay attention to electronic factors, statistical considerations, ion recombination, background radiation, the source and volume container effects, source position, source adsorption, pure beta transmitter measurements and the presence of contaminants. One of the successes of patient care in nuclear medicine (NM) is by giving accurate doses, according to the type of cancer, the volume and severity of cancer cells. Accurate doses can be achieved by implementing QA and QC at DC, which starts from the calibration stage, checks stability, linearity, and pays attention to parameters that can affect measurement. The aim is to ensure that the measurement results meet the requirements and quality standards set. There are 5 parameters that can support QC implementation, namely PC3M: Person, Chain, Machine, Material and Method. If one of these 5 parameters is missing then QC cannot be implemented.