Dear Dr. Zoomie, when our former RSO left I was asked to step in and take her place, and after a few months I’ve got to say I’m at my wit’s end. We don’t have many sources, not many rad workers, and our license isn’t very complicated – but I’m spending most of my time on RSO stuff and the only way to get my main work done is to stay late and even go in on weekends. The old RSO told me it could be a bit of work, but I don’t think she spent nearly this much time doing the job. Do you have suggestions?
Boy can I sympathize with you! I was a full-time RSO at a mid-sized university with an under-staffed office; I was a part-time RSO tasked with building a radiation safety program, starting a calibration lab, training and overseeing the cal techs, and doing all of my other duties; and I recently took over a needlessly complex radiation safety program that needed to be fixed, streamlined, and simplified, all as a collateral duty with no staff. Each time I found myself working longer hours than I’d expected…and each time I was eventually able to get the workload down to something manageable. Let me throw out some suggestions like spaghetti against the wall and see if there’s anything that sticks.
One possibility is to try to get some help – to offload some of the work that anyone can do to give you more time for the stuff that only you can do. This is with your “normal” duties as well as the RSO work. As one example – my secretary at the university ran our dosimetry program; she issued new dosimeters, did the monthly and quarterly dosimeter exchanges, handled the billing, and virtually everything else. My part was to review and initial the dosimetry reports and talk with anyone who got (or was about to get) too high a dose.
For a small licensee, chances are that your dosimetry program isn’t taking a lot of time, but every bit helps. In addition, any radiation worker can do radiation and contamination surveys, any secretary or admin assistant might be able to maintain your paperwork (filing, scanning, organizing, and so forth), If you have a hazmat program, perhaps your hazmat techs can be trained to handle radioactive waste…and the list goes on. In your case, break your tasks down into those that can only be performed by the RSO and those that can be assigned to others – then work within your organization to hand off as many of the latter as you need.
Another possibility is that your radiation safety program might be more complex than what you actually need. Where I’m at now, for example, is a fairly small radiation safety program, the remnants of what used to be one much larger and more complex. My predecessor oversaw the transition from one license to a much simpler one, but he didn’t change the radiation safety program much. As a result, being RSO was close to a full-time job, even though we didn’t have any high-activity sources and no longer used the sources we did have very often. For the better part of a year I’ve been rewriting our procedures, clearing out equipment we no longer need, sorting through our paperwork and discarding that which is past its retention period, disposing of sources we no longer use, consolidating gear into a smaller footprint, revising our training, and a myriad of other things – all aimed at down-sizing our radiation safety program to be commensurate with what we actually need.
It’s taken a LOT of work – on the other hand, I’m at the far end of that effort and being RSO is only taking up about 10-15% of my time now, down considerably from the 60-70% I was putting into it the first few months, and down even more from the 90% time commitment it was for my predecessor. In your case, I’m not sure if your program is unnecessarily complex or not – but I’d suggest taking a careful look at what you’re doing and compare it to what your license and the regulations require. Consider, too, seeing if your management will pay for a consultant to come in to take a look at what you’re doing and to suggest specific ways that it could be streamlined.
Something else to keep in mind is that pretty much everything takes more time when it’s new to you; being an RSO is no different. As you get used to your responsibilities, become accustomed to the work (and the paperwork), and settle into your position you will become faster and more efficient at the work; the first time I inventoried my sealed sources, for example, it took a half day to find them all, figure out which was which, find the right fields to fill in on the inventory form, do the leak tests, count the wipes, and so forth. I’ve cut that time in half, just as I’ve cut the amount of time needed to manage our dosimetry program, to ship our instruments for calibration, and everything else.
Without knowing more about your actual radiation safety program I can’t really make any other suggestions – but one or more of the things I mentioned ought to get you started in the right direction. And if you’re still stumped, again, consider bringing in an experienced health physicist to take a look to see if anything jumps out at them.
Good luck!