The first School for Drafting Regulations on Radiation Safety for IAEA Member States from the Caribbean has taken place from 16-27 January 2017 in Vienna, Austria. The School was supported by the IAEA’s technical cooperation programme, under the regional project RLA/9/082 ‘Establishing and Strengthening Sustainable National Regulatory Infrastructures for the Control of Radiation Sources’. The IAEA’s Schools for Drafting Regulations on Radiation Safety are designed to enable participants to gain and exchange experience and knowledge in drafting and revising regulations on radiation safety with the help of international and IAEA experts.
The School brought together fourteen participants from six IAEA Member States in the Caribbean, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as experts from Brazil, Cuba and Greece. Participants received support and assistance to draft national regulations on radiation safety in accordance with IAEA safety requirements, while taking into account national legislation and priority needs. The School targeted both Member States in which legislation addressing radiation safety is already in place and countries that are in the process of establishing such legislation but have not yet developed comprehensive radiation safety regulations. Regular review and feedback sessions allowed participants to share their experiences and to seek the advice of the experts present.
The meeting offered valuable insights for both the participating countries and the IAEA: for the former, to meet and get to know each other and the status of their respective regulatory framework and infrastructure; for the latter, to update existing information on these topics for the Caribbean region. The meeting results will be used to further improve IAEA technical cooperation programme support in the following areas: national legal and regulatory framework, implementation of regulations, establishment of regulatory bodies and their regulatory activities.
