Radiotherapy, with close to a million courses delivered per year in North America, is a very safe and effective intervention for a devastating disease. However, although rare, several deeply regrettable incidents have occurred in radiotherapy and have rightly been the subject of considerable public interest. Partly in response to reports of these incidents a variety of authoritative organizations across the globe has harnessed the expertise amongst their members in attempts to identify the measures that will make radiotherapy safer. While the intentions of all these organizations are clearly good it is challenging for the health care providers in the clinic to know where to start with so much advice coming from so many directions. Through a mapping exercise we have identified commonalities between recommendations made in seven authoritative documents and identified those issues most frequently cited. The documents reviewed contain a total of 117 recommendations. Using the 37 recommendations in "Towards Safer Radiotherapy" as the initial base layer, recommendations in the other documents were mapped, adding to the base layer to accommodate all the recommendations from the additional six documents as necessary. This mapping exercise resulted in the distillation of the original 117 recommendations down to 61 unique recommendations. Twelve topics were identified in three or more of the documents as being pertinent to the improvement of patient safety in radiotherapy. They are, in order of most to least cited: training, staffing, documentation, incident learning, communication, check lists, quality control and preventive maintenance, dosimetric audit, accreditation, minimizing interruptions, prospective risk assessment, and safety culture. This analysis provides guidance for the selection of those activities most likely to enhance safety and quality in radiotherapy based on the frequency of citation in selected recent authoritative literature.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 04 October 2012.
All research outputs
#15,422,552
of 25,756,911 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in oncology
#4,653
of 22,779 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#158,831
of 251,834 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in oncology
#50
of 162 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,756,911 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 38th percentile – i.e., 38% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 22,779 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 3.1. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 251,834 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 35th percentile – i.e., 35% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 162 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 69% of its contemporaries.
