Dosimetry of personnel in hospital sector

Workers in the medical field make up the majority (70 %) of those working under ionising radiation. Their exposure is due to practices and applications in the field. In this paper we focussed on external exposure by tackling successively the concepts from dose to dose equivalent, the main dosimeters (active and passive) available, the exposure sources and, then, the individual exposure estimated from the legal dosimetry and from some studies in operational dosimetry. At this moment data from legal dosimetry are reassuring because 93 % of workers are exposed to levels lower than the registration level of the film badge (0.2 mSv) and 98% to less than 5 mSv/year. Nevertheless, some studies in Nuclear Medicine and especially in Interventional Radiology show the need for constant information on the good practices in radiation protection, the necessity of a link between the radiation protection adviser and the concerned departments and the interest to undertake an optimisation process. (authors)