Program Information

Risk Based Quality Management: TG100 In Action

M Huq

J Palta

P Dunscombe

B Thomadsen

M Huq¹*, J Palta²*, P Dunscombe³*, B Thomadsen⁴*, (1) University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA, (2) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, (3) Tom Baker Cancer Centre, Calgary, AB, (4) University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Presentations

MO-E-9A-1 Monday 1:45PM - 3:45PM Room: 9A

One of the goals of quality management in radiation therapy is to gain high confidence that patients will receive the prescribed treatment correctly. To accomplish these goals professional societies such as the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) has published many quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and quality management (QM) guidance documents. In general, the recommendations provided in these documents have emphasized on performing device-specific QA at the expense of process flow and protection of the patient against catastrophic errors. Analyses of radiation therapy incidents find that they are most often caused by flaws in the overall therapy process, from initial consult through final treatment, than by isolated hardware or computer failures detectable by traditional physics QA. This challenge is shared by many intrinsically hazardous industries. Risk assessment tools and analysis techniques have been developed to define, identify, and eliminate known and/or potential failures, problems, or errors, from a system, process and/or service before they reach the customer. These include, but are not limited to, process mapping, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), and establishment of a quality management program that best avoids the faults and risks that have been identified in the overall process. These tools can be easily adapted to radiation therapy practices because of their simplicity and effectiveness to provide efficient ways to enhance the safety and quality of treatment processes. Task group 100 (TG100) of AAPM has developed a risk-based quality management program that uses these tools. This session will be devoted to a discussion of these tools and how these tools can be used in a given radiotherapy clinic to develop a risk based QM program.

Learning Objectives:
1. Learn how to design a process map for a radiotherapy process.
2. Learn how to perform a FMEA analysis for a given process.
3. Learn what Fault tree analysis is all about.
4. Learn how to design a quality management program based upon the information obtained from process mapping, FMEA and FTA.

Handouts

• 90-25603-334462-102998.pdf (M Huq)

• 90-25604-334462-103170.pdf (J Palta)

• 90-25605-334462-102904.pdf (P Dunscombe)

• 90-25606-334462-103312.pdf (B Thomadsen)

Contact Email: