Quality assurance in individual monitoring: A summary of the EURADOS survey 2012

• EURADOS has surveyed QA practice amongst European dosimetry services.
• The survey was comprehensive, covering most of the monitored workers in Europe.
• The profile of QA among IMS is reassuringly high.
• Many services follow formal QA standards, e.g. ISO 17025.
• But there are still some lessons that can be learned.

EURADOS Working Group 2 (WG2) on Harmonization of Individual Monitoring is a network of individual monitoring services (IMSs) that aims to promote quality, technical excellence and good practice in European Member States. To help to improve quality, in 2012 EURADOS WG2 carried out a survey of IMSs in Europe. The survey was sent to about 170 IMS and included questions on: the use of formal quality assurance (QA) standards, QA in dosimetry, matters of practice, and common sources of error. The present paper summarises the main findings of the survey, and compares them with those of an earlier study (2003). The survey found that profile of QA is high amongst the responding IMSs, and that most are following good practice. A majority of services comply with formal quality standards and good attention is paid to traceability, method validation and proficiency testing. There are some areas where lessons can be learned, for example in the assessment of measurement uncertainty; and it remains very instructive to see what the main causes of error are for IMSs in general.