Cancer treatment room found to have been leaking radiation
A cancer treatment room of a Melbourne hospital has been leaking radiation, prompting Clayton's Monash Medical Centre to report itself to Victoria's Health Department.
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TVTranscript
00:00 The hospital was looking to increase the number of patients in its thyroid cancer room and
00:06 was doing a bit of a safety investigation when it worked out the concrete slabs basically
00:10 sandwiching the top and the bottom of the treatment room weren't actually 40 centimetres
00:16 but were 14 centimetres thick.
00:19 Now for the context, radiation is measured in millisieverts and background radiation,
00:27 patients like you and I would be exposed to 1.7 millisieverts from things like our diet,
00:31 from rocks, from the soil, things like that and the public safety limit is one millisievert
00:37 and the hospital says it's confident that staff were not exposed to any more than one
00:41 millisievert.
00:42 Now that has a little bit of cold comfort to some of the staff members I've been speaking
00:48 to and I think understandably if you were going to work and finding out that you were
00:55 being exposed to radiation that you didn't realise was there before you would be quite
01:01 upset.
01:02 The hospital reported itself to the Department of Health immediately, it closed the treatment
01:09 room temporarily, it moved treatments to weekends, it let staff know that this had happened but
01:17 Freedom of Information documents reveal that the department was not thrilled with the hospital
01:22 accusing it of providing false and misleading information about the size of these concrete
01:28 slabs.
01:29 It is quite a stark difference, 40 centimetres to 14 centimetres.
01:32 The staff that we've been speaking to say that now that the room has been locked temporarily
01:38 it says to them that the magnitude of the risk was great, that's at least how they're
01:44 feeling.
01:45 The hospital has now reopened that room for treatment and has described this whole affair
01:50 as a potential minor safety issue.
01:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]