the weekly source for radiology professionals

Changes at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

Wow, what a hectic month at Children's MR Department! With the opening of our new MRI suite next month we are currently working on updating our department to ensure we are compliant with the American College of Radiology's revised MR Safety Guidelines for 2007. These guidelines highlight all safety standards that MR sites should follow and is the backbone of our MR safety policy here at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Most notiby, this year we will be improving our patient safety screening by adding a second more interactive review of the screening form which includes a patient/parent interview and we will implement ferrous scanning of all patients using a hand held wand device. This screening will be one additional way we can prevent patient injury--especially with our new, stronger 3T scanner being installed this month. The ACR MRI Safety Guidlines for 2007 can be found at www.acr.org.

Joint Commission Readiness

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is due for a Joint Commission inspection this year. Our radiology department is preparing by doing monthly tracers in each modality. The tracers test our knowledge of the guidelines and grades are area re: compliance (i.e., HIPAA). We also have had 6 one hour mandatory classes to educate the staff regarding Joint Commission guidelines.

One of our major concerns has been "first dose" compliance as applied to contrast. Thankfully, the Joint Commission's release at the end of January has made this much simpler. We have mandated that all the staff members complete a contrast module outlining the safe processes of giving contrast including knowledge of pharmacy and radiology approved contrast dosing protocols.

APEX Award ASBPE Award APEX Award ASHPE Award