1) To understand radiotherapy as a work system and the requirements and necessity for a safety culture. 2) To understand how humans perform tasks and how they fail. 3) To understand the process of risk analysis. 4) To understand quality management concepts, tools and approaches. 5) To understand how to go from the results of the risk analysis to a quality program. 6) To understand the principles for establishing an incident reporting system and to learn about the national radiotherapy incident reporting and learning systems. 7) To understand the process of root-cause analysis for investigating events. 8) To understand the tools and techniques for quality improvement and managing change.

This session will give a brief summary of concepts, procedures and tools for addressing quality health care and patient safety in radiotherapy using systems engineering approaches that have proven effective in other fields of medicine and widely in industry. Establishing quality management procedures takes a risk-analysis approach, beginning with mapping a process, assessing the risks at each step, determining the propagation of failures and addressing potential failures with the most effective tools. The session also considers how to maintain and continually improve quality and safety in a radiotherapy facility through incident reporting, root-cause analysis and quality improvement techniques. Understanding these approaches requires knowledge of safety culture, work systems and how humans succeed and fail, all of which will be covered in this session.

Physics Symposium: Quality and Safety in Radiotherapy: Learning the New Approaches in TG-100 and Beyond.  Radiological Society of North America 2014 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, - ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2014/14002747.html