Hi, Dr. Zoomie! I’m a part-time RSO and I’ve got to admit that the job is taking more time than I have available. I don’t mind being RSO; it’s just that fitting it into my other work is a pain in the neck. Any suggestions?
Wow – this is sort of a wide-open question. There are a lot of ways to cut down on the amount of time you spend running your radiation safety program, but mostly it depends on what kind of a license and radiation safety program you have. In general, some of the reasons for your RSO responsibilities taking more time than ought to be the case include:
- Doing work you don’t need to do
- Using outdated or needlessly complex procedures
- Having an outdated or needlessly complex radiation safety program
- Maintaining too many instruments and sources for the work you do
- Not delegating responsibilities that don’t require the RSO to attend to personally
There’s more, but this gives us a good place to start – let’s take a quick look at an example of each of these.
Doing work you don’t need to do: Make sure that everything you’re doing is required by regulations or by your radioactive materials license. If you’re doing things that aren’t required, ask yourself why and what happens if you stop. For example – regulations (and most licenses) require leak testing radioactive sources that have more than 100 µCi of activity (for beta- and/or gamma-emitting nuclides) or more than 10 µCi of activity (for alpha-emitters). If you’re leak testing every one of your sources, regardless of their activity then you can save time by cutting back to leak testing only the sources you’re required to check.
Using outdated or needlessly complex procedures: A lot of RSOs just aren’t very good at writing procedures, or they might have inherited a procedures manual from a predecessor who wrote poor SOPs. There can also be a tendency to always be thinking about passing inspections and wanting to not just meet, but to exceed regulatory requirements to make sure there can’t be any violations during an inspection. But everything you do that’s not required is time that could be spent on something else.
I recently revised a procedure for testing 300 radiation instruments monthly that called for clearing the accumulated dose, history, and log files of each instrument; this required connecting every instrument to a computer and using vendor software – it took about 3 minutes, navigating four windows, and just under 20 clicks for each instrument. Of these, only the accumulated dose needed to be cleared (which took only 15 seconds), and that didn’t require connecting the instrument to the computer. Changing this procedure saved us more than 12 person-hours of time each month – 144 person-hours (3 ½ person-weeks) annually. And that was just one part of a multi-part procedure; applying the same thinking to the entire procedure let us cut the total time for instrument testing from 80 person-hours every two weeks to 6.
Having an outdated or needlessly complex radiation safety program:
I used to manage a radiation safety program that had over 1500 badged radiation workers and took about 50% of my secretary’s time simply to manage the monthly dosimeter exchange and records review. On top of that, some badges were exchanged monthly, some every two months, others quarterly, and a handful semi-annually. When I started looking into it I realized that more than 1000 of those people didn’t need to be badged at all and we could justify reading badges only monthly or quarterly; changing the dosimetry to badge only the people who needed them and reducing the dosimetry exchange options to monthly or quarterly saved a lot of time for me, my secretary, and the labs – and it saved the university close to $100,000 annually. These sorts of things – meeting regulatory requirements but not exceeding them can save you a lot of time.
Maintaining too many instruments and sources for the work you do: The radiation safety program I’m running now is relatively small – we only use about a dozen sources three or four times a year. But when I inherited it from the previous RSO we had close to 250 sources and 60 instruments, the majority of which we never used. So I disposed of nearly 200 sources, gave away another 25 or so (all to licensees), and gave away more than half of our instruments. The previous RSO spent 100% of his time maintaining our radiation safety program; it takes me about 10% of my time, our calibration budget is less than half of what it used to be, and I’ve had nothing but good program audits and inspections.
Not delegating responsibilities that don’t require the RSO to attend to personally: Much of the work or running a radiation safety program can be done by just about anyone. Filing, for example, doesn’t require 40 hours of training, nor does the routine work of managing a dosimetry program (sending monthly or quarterly dosimetry reports or issuing and exchanging badges). Even if you can’t get yourself a technical assistant, you might be able to talk your boss into letting you have an administrative assistant or clerical worker for a half day or so each week, freeing you up to do other things.
These are just a few areas in which you can try to wave yourself some time, and there are more. The bottom line is that, if you’re overworked as RSO, taking a close look at your radiation safety program and simplifying it, cutting it down to the right size, and trying to get help can all help to reduce the among of time you spend on your RSO duties.
Good luck!