The SCoR is producing guidance on how to comply with transgender legislation and guidance in relation to procedures involving ionising radiation (IRMER).
The guidance addresses the tricky question - if you do not know the biological gender of someone identifying as male, are you obliged to ask all men of childbearing age whether they may be pregnant?
The sex, Identity, Gender and Expression (SIGE) form approach is to ask everyone where their reproductive organs are:
Internal (ovaries, uterus)
External (testes)
I do not have any reproductive organs
I am unsure of the answer (please speak to a technologist prior to your exam)
Those that respond saying they have internal reproductive organs are then asked the pregnancy LMP questions.
I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on the practicalities of implementing this? Also around the related issues of GDPR and consent for storing that information that the college mentions? Has anyone updated their department policies to reflect this yet?
It’s worth noting, relevant to this discussion, that the BIR published guidance last year advising that contact shielding, including gonads shielding, is no longer recommended
The overall conclusion from the available evidence is that patient contact shielding is not
generally required in diagnostic and interventional radiology. The fundamental reason
being to protect the patient, given that the use of patient contact shielding can often
actually lead to an increase in patient dose (due to the need to repeat an examination or
interference with automatic dose control systems). Even outside the primary radiation
beam, efforts spent on correct positioning and optimising protocol parameters can lead to
dose savings which are more significant than applying patient contact shielding. This overall
conclusion is in line with the recent American Association of Physicists in Medicine position
statement regarding gonad and fetal shielding.