Duties and Responsibilities of the Radiation Safety Officer (RSO)

In this week's video, Eric from Olympic Health Physics provides an overview of the duties and responsibilities of the RSO or Radiation Safety Officer. This video covers the regulatory requirements and expectations of a medical RSO following the guidance in NUREG 1556, Vol. 9, Rev. 3. that is specific to medical licensees.
You can find a full article on our blog at www.olympichp.com/duties-of-t...
Video Chapters
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00:00 Introduction
00:58 Stop Work Authority
02:10 Conduct Training
02:24 Transportation and Delivery of Radioactive Materials
02:54 Oversee and Implement the Dosimetry Program
03:09 Security of Radioactive Material
03:39 Documentation
04:02 Liaison with Regulators
04:17 Manage the Radioactive Materials License
04:52 Implement Corrective Actions
To learn more about medical physics, radiation safety, and other radiology content, check out our blog at: www.olympichp.com/blog/
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[@Ayat_Rad_Tales]

Great content.

[@justinmanny86]

What are the requirements to become an RSO? Is there a course to get certified? The reason I ask, I basically already do this at my current position. If you could help me out with this, that would be awesome!

[@olympichp]

Hi Justin - the requirements to be an RSO can be complicated based on the types of radioactive materials use as well as the regulatory agency (NRC or Agreement State). There are many companies that offer 40 hour RSO courses, either in person or online. Those courses are a great supplement but are often not sufficient to provide all of the required training and experience necessary to function as an RSO. Feel free to drop us a note at [e-mail] if you'd like to chat about what your best options are.

[@justinmanny86]

@@olympichp I reached out to my state this afternoon after I left this comment. Apparently there isn't a license required to be an RSO here. But in other states, do you need to have an active x-ray license in order to get certified as an RSO?

[@mattromberg8372]

If TH-cam allows it, I'd add that this is for Nuclear Medicine RSOs. Over half of this video doesn't apply to an RSO in a clinic/SCA setting or in a hospital that doesn't have Nuc Med. You also don't mention quite a few basic things 95% of RSOs monitor like lead inspections, PM and QA of machines, repeat/reject logs etc. I would just tell most RSOs watching this, it isn't going to tell you much unless you want a very general overview of an NM RSO's responsibilities.

[@olympichp]

Hi Matt, and thank you for the feedback. You're correct that many RSO's have additional duties outside of just RAM licensing duties. The ones you mention are common and there are many more. In this video, we focused on the duties of the RSO as they're defined in NUREG 1556, Vol. 9., Rev. 3. to highlight the regulatory expectation of a medical RSO. We updated the description of this video in hopes that will help.