Poster — Thur Eve — 38: Review of couch parameters using an FMEA

• Published in: Medical physics (Lancaster) Vol. 39; no. 7; p. 4631
• Main Authors: Larouche, R, Doucet, R, Rémy, E, Filion, A, Poirier, L
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Association of Physicists in Medicine 01-07-2012
• Subjects: Failure analysis; Medical imaging; Therapeutics; Failure analysis; Medical imaging; Therapeutics
• ISSN: 0094-2405; 2473-4209
• DOI: 10.1118/1.4740146

To improve patient safety during positioning, we undertook a systematic review of the processes used by our center to obtain couch positions. We used a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) framework and fifteen different possible failures were identified and rated. The three major failures were 1) Loss of planned couch position and bias from the previous day's couch position, 2) DICOM origin or isocenter is different between two plans (imaging or treatment), and 3) Patient shift in opposite direction than intended. The main effect of these failures was to cause an override of couch parameters. Based on these results, we modified our processes, introduced new QA and software checks and developed new tolerance tables so as to improve system robustness and increase our success rate at catching failures before they can affect the patient. It has been a year since we made these modifications. Based on our results, we have reduced the number of overrides at our center from a maximum of 20.5% to a maximum of 6.3%, with an average at 4% of daily treatments. Our results suggest that FMEA is an effective tool in improving treatment quality that could be used in other centers.