OTHEA/RELIR

History

Objectives

OTHEA is a bi-lingual (French and English) website, and the purpose is to share the lessons learnt from radiological incidents that have occurred in the industrial, medical, research and teaching, and other non-nuclear sectors. The aim is not to capture every single incident, but to provide a range of reports selected according to the value of the lessons learnt.

The RELIR network aims at collecting information about typical incidents or accidents in the industrial, medical and research sectors. The purpose is not to generate an exhaustive listing of incidents, but to select the events being most interesting in workers’ training and incident prevention. Incidents reports are all structured in the same way: circumstances of the incident, radiological consequences and a list of lessons learned.

To encourage dissemination the incident reports are anonymous, ie any information that could identify a particular individual, organisation or site is removed. The reports can be freely downloaded and printed, for example for use in radiation protection training courses.

The objectives of these networks are to train the RP professionals to prevent new incidents; to produce training aids to be used during initial or on-the-job training sessions for workers; to promote information exchanges among radiation protection specialists and non-specialists.

Members and Organization

OTHEA has been jointly created by the Centre d’étude sur l’évaluation de la protection dans le domaine nucléaire (CEPN, France) and the Health Protection Agency (HPA, UK). It is also supported by national radiation protection societies and associations, regulatory authorities and other stakeholders (see the OTHEA website for a full list of partner and supporting organisations).

RELIR relies on a network of radiation protection professionals, called moderators, who are all volunteers: they are the direct contacts for anyone involved or witness of an incident. CEPN and INRS jointly coordinate the French network.

Main Activities

The website contains a collection of incident reports, categorised according to the sector and the type of application, and a search facility. Each report contains a brief summary of the incident, the radiological consequences, and the lessons learned.

For OTHEA to be a long-term success, it needs to be sustained with new reports. Therefore, as well as being invited to access the existing information, users are encouraged to submit new reports that can be considered for inclusion in OTHEA. Details on how to do this can be found on the website.

Reports

More than 50 incident reports are available in French and in English in the RELIR/ OTHEA libraries. They cover different sectors: industry, medical field, research and transports.

For more information visit the OTHEA website.