European Curriculum for Safety Officers in MRI

MR safety is one part of the duties of a person working in an MR department. Looking briefly at the different aspects of an MR radiographer (or equivalent), we can divide this into four pillars:

• A psycho-social pillar focusing on patient-centred care with an eye on perception of care, task-oriented interaction and control of the environment.
• An examination executing pillar that focuses on the obeying of examination procedures.
• A pillar of MR safety regarding the patient, staff and own safety is an essential task of an MR radiographer.
• The biomedical-physical pillar underpins all the knowledge and skills essential to perform examinations, provide patient education, quality assurance, safety and risk management.

In addition, the availability of MR devices has increased significantly across Europe in recent years (Healthcare resource statistics, 2020) and thus means that more MR units or more/larger MR departments are emerging with their own challenges around MR safety.

Within medical imaging, patient safety is held in high regard. If we translate patient safety into MR safety, according to the ESR and EFRS, we mean the following: behaviour of ferromagnetic objects, static and gradient magnetic fields, radiofrequency-related risks and acoustic noise. 

Several actors are involved, for example, each country has some sort of safety regulations which are mainly based on MHRA and ACR recommendations. Recommendations are often given by the ISMRM, ESR and EFRS who are defining different roles and responsibilities in managing MR safety.

We need to ask ourselves is there a need for specific education? How do we know we are working in a safe environment, this is often indicated by reporting incidents. A recent study by Kihlberg et al. (2022) showed an underreporting of MR incidents. Some of those incidents could possibly have a catastrophic outcome. One of the potential causes is that there is more need for easily and accessible education and more collaboration between professional groups. To accommodate those needs we can work towards an educational program for radiographers or equivalent professions. There is a lot available about MR safety in MR educational programs. Each program has aspects of MR safety, but is there cohesion? There are also different levels of MR knowledge. Not everybody has the same level of understanding: you have persons who are involved in the patient’s care pathway (in the broad sense), radiographers working in MRI and MR safety officers. (EFRS, 2021). So there is a need for an MRSO in each department.

A Magnetic Resonance Safety Officer (MRSO)  is a person who is closely involved with MR scanning, usually a radiographer (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia) or an MRI technologist (mainly USA and Canada but also in parts of Asia), who typically holds a postgraduate qualification in MRI/MRI Safety.

The MR safety officer is trained in knowledge, skills and competences related to patient care and safety, safe use of equipment (hardware and software) and is able to communicate with patients, volunteers, medical imaging and ancillary non MRI trained staff.

More information: EFRS. Magnetic Resonance Safety Officer (MRSO) Role Descriptor: An European Qualifications Framework (EQF) benchmarking document.

We are bringing experts and educators together from all over Europe so we can share good practices, so we can learn from each other’s experiences in teaching safety-related topics and dissemination of knowledge. (Calamante et al., 2016) to develop a curriculum in a European context.

The pandemic has taught us how we can actively engage in online and offline learning. So we can bring radiographers together wanting to learn about MR Safety. The curriculum should be well balanced between contact and digital learning. Contact learning is still valuable so there is bonding with the institution it activates social interaction which is a necessity to activate deep learning. Digital learning has the added value to look into topics from another perspective (for example from other experts across Europe) and you can learn on your own pace. Finding a balance between those, it is possible, form an educator’s perspective to support the learning pathway in a better way by using learning analytics. (ACCO, 2021).