Introduction to the use of fram on the effectiveness assessment of a radiopharmaceutical dispatches process

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Ana Gabriela Amorim Abreu
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IEN
• Texto Completo: http://carpedien.ien.gov.br:8080/handle/ien/2397
• topic: INAC 2013; Functional Resonance Analysis Method; Radiopharmaceutical; Radioactive materials; Nuclear medicine

This article aims to make an introduction to the use of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) on the effectiveness assessment of a specific radiopharmaceutical dispatching process. The main purpose was to provide a didactic view of the method application to further in-depth analysis. The investigation also provided a relevant body of knowledge of radiopharmaceuticals dispatches processes. This work uses the term ‘effectiveness assessment’ instead of ‘risk assessment’ due to the broader meaning the former provide. The radiopharmaceutical dispatching process is the final task of a dynamic system designed to attend several medical facilities. It is comprised by functions involving mostly human activities, such as checking and packaging the product and measuring the radiopharmaceutical nuclear activity. Although the dispatch process has well-known steps for its completion, the human factor is the fundamental mechanism of work and control, being susceptible of irregular and instable performance. As a socio-technical system, the risk assessment provided by FRAM may be of importance for safety and quality improvements, even more if considered the nuclear nature of the product, which makes risk assessment critical and mandatory. A system is safe if it is resistant and resilient to perturbations. Identification and assessment of possible risks is, therefore, an essential prerequisite for system safety. Although this seems obvious, most risk assessments are conducted under relative ignorance of the full behavior of the system. Such condition has lead to an approach to assess the risks of intractable systems (i.e., systems that are incompletely described or underspecified), namely Resilience Engineering. Into this area, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method has been developed in order to provide concepts, terminology and a set of methods capable of dealing with such systems. The study was conducted following the Functional Resonance Analysis Method. At first, the functions of the radiopharmaceutical dispatches process were identified and described as required for everyday performance to succeed, than for every function the essentials aspects for the function to be carried out were described. After that, some scenarios or instantiations of the model were analyzed in order to propose ways to monitor and dampen performance variability.