Radiation protection procedures in Spain hospitals

Full text: The Radiation Protection Handbook of any Spanish Hospital must contain a set of working procedures, some of them demanded by the Nuclear Security Council (those which are related to the radiation protection of exposed workers and to the installation radiation safety), while some others, which concern to the patient radiation protection, are dependent of the health authorities. The content of any procedure is written in an specific document that describes in a clear, accurate and sequential way the steps we must to follow to begin, develop and to conclude an activity, including the technical element to employ, the required working conditions, the scopes and fixed limitations, the number and characteristic of the personal, and so on, so that for each procedure the principles of justification, limitation and dose optimization can be fulfilled. In this work it is summarized our experience in the Radiation Protection Unit of the Hospital 'Infanta Cristina', in Badajoz (Spain), related with the implementation of a set of working radiation protection procedures that go from the 'Classification of radiological zones', to the 'radiation protection of the patients treated with I-131 or Sm-153', by telling some of them. As an example it is attached a wide summary of the radiation protection procedure for patient in treatment with Sm-153. (orig.)