Knowledge about ionizing radiation amongst community and medical staff

Introduction. Imaging tests become one of the main human-made ionizing radiation sources in these days. Computed tomography (CT) performed within one year could cause more than 29,000 oncological diseases in the future. Further, high dose of radiation could cause acute sickness, infertility or immunosuppression. It is always important to evaluate community and medical staff knowledge level of radiation to improve the current situation. Aim. To identify community and medical stuff knowledge about ionizing radiation and to evaluate how did they get information about it. Materials and methods. The study was conducted in Lithuanian university of health sciences from December 2016 to July 2017. Original questionnaire was prepared by researchers using published data in this field. All participants were classified in three groups – radiology related, other medical stuff and radiology unrelated persons. The ratio of participants correct answers to all questions was converted to the percentage and data was processed by using analysis software package SPSS 24 (Mann Whitney, Pearson Chi square, Kruskal-Wallis tests). Results. 184 volunteers were surveyed. The average of respondents results was 67.5 %. The average of correct answers in female group was 66.4 % and in male group was 70.9 %. Knowledge of female and male did not show statistically significant difference. 75.5 % know that X-ray involve radiation and 69.6 % of participants know that CT involve it as well. Respondents related to radiology and medical physicians statistically had equal knowledge level. Also, 50.0 % of respondents were informed or had information about radiation before radiological tests from different sources. There was no statistically significant difference between knowledge of subjects who were informed about medical radiation and those who were not informed. Conclusion. There is no difference between females and males, medical physicians a[...]