Assessment the Awareness and Knowledge Level about Radiation Protection : An Empirical Study on the Radiology Professionals of the Radiology Departments , East Java Indonesia

Rationale and Objective: first of all, as long as there are ways and foundations to protect ourselves from radiation then it must be pointedly taken into account and do the best for that. Second, since radiation protection is as important as radiation exposure and also CT scanner emits an extremely large amount of radiation comparing to the conventional x-ray and radiation has negative biological effects on living organisms which may lead to cancerous cells. Therefore, this study comes to shed a light on radiation protection and aims to assess the awareness & knowledge of radiology professionals and how they influence on the protection at radiology departments in CT units. Materials and Methods: questionnaire was applied to radiology professionals who work at radiology department in CT unit. In this study target groups were “technologists, physicists and radiologists who had been asked to fill in the questionnaire consisting of their actual assessment and knowledge on ionizing radiation and its protection. All questions were in multiple choice formats using Likert scale ranging from 1 to 4. Then, the obtained data were analyzed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Partial Least Square (PLS) softwares. Results: in this study 102 participants had taken part. Their level of awareness and knowledge about radiation protection and radiation doses and side effects were found to be between fairly good and good overall. However, the high effect was evidently appeared between Awareness & knowledge and Protection in present study. The respondents sample included technologist “radiographer”, physicist and radiologist with percentages 69.6%, 2.0% and 28.4% respectively. However, the percentage of physicist was too low, which can understand that the hospitals lack these important people and the majority of covered hospitals do not have such as at all. In addition, based on their main Career as one of the most notable classifications in the questionnaire the results have shown whether it impact on the Awareness and Knowledge of radiation protection in general or not. So, the majority of categories were in fact either good or fairly good within all level degree too. The statistical methods analyzing show that all hypotheses were supported with value of t-statistics greater than 1.96 with error level α = 5%. Generally, analyzing the present study in details, it is surprising that the knowledge and awareness on radiation protection and safety among the participants were between a moderate and excellent level. On the other hand, strangely there were few of them who did not know that ionizing radiation is not used in MRI and US. Conclusion: the present study has illustrated that general assessment and knowledge related to ionizing radiation, its protection, radiation doses and side effects are sufficient among target groups CT units. The results highlight the majority of participants have had courses and studied in curriculum during their study about radiation protection and they comply with radiation protection protocol in hospitals. Finally, from findings it can be noted that protection is in a linear relationship with general awareness & knowledge, knowledge about radiation doses and knowledge about side effects.