Botched X-rays can shower patients with dangerous doses of radiation. Yet efforts by hospitals and regulators to maintain minimum standards of competence for technicians operating imaging machines have fallen short.
The longstanding worries about X-ray foulups, along with the elevated dangers posed by more complicated medical devices such as CT scanners and linear accelerators, for years have spurred calls for new laws to establish training and certification requirements for equipment operators.
Yet, as The New York Times reports, efforts to win adoption of federal legislation to accomplish those goals have fallen short time after time despite significant support among both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the backing of a wide range of medical groups.
Supporters say the setbacks have stemmed from the failure of a powerful legislator to come forward to champion the cause. The closest such a law has come to passing was in 2006. A so-called CARE bill was passed by the Senate that year but the House, despite 135 co-sponsors, adjourned before following suit, and the bill was not taken up in the new Congress.
Many states, likewise, have failed to address the issue. According to the American Society of Radiologic Technologists, which has lobbied for federal legislation for 12 years, radiation therapists are unregulated in 15 states, imaging technologists in 11 states and medical physicists in 18 states.
“It’s amazing to us, knowing the complexity of medical imaging, that there are states that require massage therapists and hairdressers to be licensed, but they have no standards in place for exposing patients to ionizing radiation,” Christine Lung, a vice president with the association, told the Times.
Meanwhile, as the Times has illustrated in its series on medical radiation, examples of bad accidents and regulatory inaction abound. For example, in 2007 hospital officials discovered that premature babies were wrongly given potentially dangerous full-body X-rays at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Yet until just over a week ago, when the Times asked about the incident, state authorities said they weren’t aware of it, and only then did they launch an investigation.
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