Biomedical Engineering

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Browsing Biomedical Engineering by Author "Alemu Nigusse"

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    Investigating and Automating Ethiopia's Radiation-Generating Medical Device Inspection System
    (Addis Ababa University, 2022-04) Alemu Nigusse; Masreshaw Demelash (PhD)
    Ionizing radiation is energy in the form of wave or particles that have enough energy to remove electrons from the atoms. Since this radiation imposes a deterministic and stochastic effects on human being, the source needs strict regulation to minimize the risks and hazards as low as rea-sonably achievable. In the healthcare sector, the major sources of ionizing radiation are Radiation Generating Devices (RGDs) such as radiotherapy machine, CT-Scan machine, and X-ray machine. Ethiopian Radiation Protection Authority (ERPA) is established to regulate such sources during import, transport, use, and export. However, previous studies revealed the exposure of workers around this practice is above the exposure limit of International Basic Safety Standard. The aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate the gaps around regulation of RGDs and showcase one way to improve the regulatory system. For the investigation, an institutional based cross-sec-tional study was carried out in nine hospitals and one authority (ERPA) from October in 2016 to February in 2017 in Addis Ababa. A total of 102 professionals were purposively selected as re-spondents based on the inclusive criteria, out of which 72 were selected from nine hospitals and the rest 30 were selected from ERPA. The data were collected through structured questionnaires, focused group discussion, document analysis and practical observation. The result indicates the overall mean of respondents who reported that there were regulatory in-spection was 73.8% in ERPA and 65.1% in hospitals; checked out each safety control parameters was 89.8% in ERPA and 80% in hospitals; and checked out each performance indicator parameters was 81.7% in ERPA as well as 66.9% in hospitals. Furthermore, more than 90% (27) of partici-pants, for each item, in ERPA believed that there is no enough professional man power in ERPA; and 90% (27) of respondents disagreed that the expected inspection frequency is specified for each devices; and the overall mean of about 64.9% of participants in ERPA disagreed on each staff management requirements. Moreover, more than half (50.5%) of respondents in hospitals disagreed and strongly disagreed on availability and appliance of each inspection procedure. The finding of this thesis revealed different gaps during regulatory inspection such as missing of RGDs, bypassing safety control and performance indicator parameters; and lack of material and human resource in the staff of ERPA. HTML5, MySQL, PHP, XAMPP, and CSS3 soft- wares were employed to develop a Web-based scheduling and registration system. It is believed that the developed system can be a showcase solution for the problems related to accessing and retrieving, registering & scheduling, deleting & adding, editing, storing, and updating any necessary infor-mation of RGDs that the regulatory body needs to do its activities properly.