Radiation Safety Awareness among Healthcare Workers in Middle Eastern Countries
Bugra Kaya
Department of Nuclear Medicine, Meram Medical Faculty Hospital, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey
Namaitijiang Maimaiti *
Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey
S. Didem Kaya
Department of Health Management, Faculty of Health Science, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Aim of the study is to review the awareness level of radiation risks in health care sectors among healthcare workers in Middle Eastern countries. This is an intensive literature review study. Search was done using google scholar, PubMed and Science Direct engines, with key words like The Search was limited to articles written in English which were published from January 2005 through June 2016. Only original papers that described health care worker’s knowledge on radiation safety and radiation risk in the hospitals and clinics were included. We excluded studies described medical and health science student’s knowledge on radiation safety and those published before year 2005. A total of 28 articles were screened from initial review and only twelve papers meet our inclusion criteria, out of this six papers described doctor’s knowledge, three of them described radiographers, and two of them described medical staffs and only one paper described nurse’s knowledge. Most of the studies reported that level of knowledge was less than 50% among the healthcare workers. Base on the available articles we have found that level of knowledge of health care workers was very poor in the Middle Eastern countries.
Keywords: Radiation safety, radiation risk, health care workers, Middle Eastern countries.