ABSTRACT
Purpose: The potential for individual radiosensitivity and radiosusceptibility testing, both in clinical practice and in systems of radiological protection, raises complex ethical considerations which must be addressed both in relation to the scientific research looking at the issues themselves, and in relation to any systems of safety and protection which are then proposed for introduction.Methods: This paper uses ethical principles for radiological protection derived by the ICRP together with other biomedical principles, to identify and evaluate some of the ethical issues associated with radiosensitivity testing.Results and conclusions: Although the evaluation is not exhaustive, it illustrates a range of different ethical aspects that would need to be considered, prior to making recommendations for how the field might better address these challenges in its future development.
Subject(s)
Ethics, Medical , Radiation Oncology/ethics , Radiation Protection/methods , Radiation Tolerance , Humans , International Cooperation , Occupational Exposure , Occupational Health , Radiation Exposure , Radiation Monitoring/ethics , Radiation, Ionizing , Risk AssessmentABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: UK statutory systems for occupational disease recording do not include mental illness resulting from occupational stress. The issue is included within physician reporting systems, but there is no agreed set of criteria for diagnosis of occupational causation and no agreed system of categorization in terms of type of causation by workplace factors. METHOD: A multidisciplinary group of occupational health professionals, in conjunction with human resources staff, developed a system for the diagnosis, categorization and recording of occupational mental ill-health. RESULTS: The developed system was applied as a pilot and the outcome from its first year of use is presented. CONCLUSIONS: The system is considered to have operated well in pilot, and has now been adopted as a standard operating procedure by the occupational health provider who developed it. The system is proposed as a tool in the development of standardized NHS or UK national systems for the recording of occupational mental ill-health.