Possibilities of comparing the average annual effective doses of medical personnel in Russia and some foreign countries

Abstract

The analysis of published data on the average annual effective doses to personnel of Russia, Germany, Switzerland, France and Canada in dynamics for 2013-2017 was performed. It was established that in the countries under consideration there are significant differences in the processing of primary measurement information, the calculation on its basis of individual effective doses, as well as ways of averaging the data obtained and their presentation. Factors that may lead to different interpretations of the results are considered: – taking into account background doses due to natural radiation; – use in processing the results of various (in different countries) values of the minimum level of registration; – dose averaging in the absence of activity periods (loss of a dosimeter / vacation), and when registering unexpectedly high doses. These differences exist between the data of foreign countries, but the data presented by the Russian Joint state system of control and accounting of the individual doses of the citizens are especially different. It is shown that the data on average annual effective doses to personnel presented in the Federal Data Base of personnel exposure doses within the framework of the Russian Joint state system of control and accounting of the individual doses is 3-4 times higher than in foreign countries. It is shown that such a difference is caused not by actually high doses, but by the method of processing primary information and averaging data during generalization. It should be noted that such differences occur only for extremely small doses of technogenic exposure to personnel, and do not lead to a significant impact on the overall assessment of the state of radiation safety in the country, but when comparing with other countries, it is necessary to understand the reasons for such differences. The purpose of this work was to identify the causes of these discrepancies and to develop a method for processing primary measurement information and averaging the data when summarizing the results, which allows them to be significantly reduced. Such a method should ensure that the effective doses of personnel closest to the conditionally true values are obtained in the entire range of values, and can be used to summarize the data contained in the Federal Data Base of personnel exposure doses. Since the conversion of the data contained in the Federal Data Base of personnel exposure doses was not the task of the authors of this article, in order to achieve this goal, an attempt was made to process and summarize the measurement results (total 23 204) of the quarterly values of the individual dose equivalent Hp (10) obtained in the Laboratory of Radiation Control of Saint-Petersburg Research Institute of the Radiation Hygiene after Professor P.V. Ramzaev. Such processing has been performed. The subsequent comparison showed that the average annual effective doses to the personnel of medical organizations of St.-Petersburg, in which individual dosimetric control was carried out in the Laboratory of Radiation Control, transformed according to the developed algorithm, are much better consistent with similar data from foreign countries.