Ionizing radiation regulations and the dental practitioner: 3. quality assurance in dental radiography

A radiograph can be justified when it delivers a net benefit to the patient, ie it helps with diagnosis and/or patient management. This cannot be said of poor quality radiographs, which may yield little or no diagnostic information, and may result in misleading radiographic appearances.

It has been acknowledged, both in the UK and worldwide, that dental radiographs have not always achieved high quality standards, and that this has had a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care.1^,2^,3 The Ionizing Radiations Regulations 1999 addressed this issue by introducing into the UK a mandatory duty to set up and maintain a quality assurance programme for dental radiographs in whatever setting these were taken.

Quality Assurance (QA) describes ‘that set of activities that are carried out to set standards and to monitor and improve performance so that the care provided will satisfy stated or implied needs.’4 It is a systematic process to check for and, where appropriate, correct errors in the production of dental radiographs to prevent or limit further unsatisfactory images. The aim of a quality control programme is to produce consistently high quality images whilst keeping doses as low as reasonably practicable and, when properly performed, carries benefits to both the patient and the practice because it: