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Since 2005, ASN has received a large number of radiotherapy event notifications. For some, no health consequences have as yet come to light, while others entail serious complications for the patients, even resulting in death in a few cases. In this context, ASN has since 2007 been inspecting all the radiotherapy centres, concentrating in particular on organisational and human factors. At the same time, in addition to publishing criteria for the notification of significant radiation protection events, ASN in conjunction with SFRO, developed a scale for rating the severity of events affecting patients undergoing a medical radiotherapy procedure.

For more than a century now, and for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, medicine has made use of a variety of ionising radiations sources, produced either by electric generators, or by artificial radionuclides. Even if their benefits and usefulness have long been medically proven, these techniques do however make a significant contribution to exposing the population to ionising radiations. Behind exposure to natural radiation (NORM), they represent the second source of exposure for the population and the leading source of artificial exposure (see chapter 1).

Protection of the staff working in installations using ionising radiations for medical purposes is regulated by the provisions of the Labour Code. These regulations were updated in November 2007 (see chapter 3).

The installations themselves and their use are required to comply with specific technical and administrative rules, while the use of radioactive sources is subject to specific management rules contained in the Public Health Code, also updated in November 2007 (see chapter 3).

In recent years, the technical regulations have been considerably strengthened with the creation of a new set of regulations dedicated to patient radiation protection (see chapter 3). The principles of justification of procedures and optimisation of the doses delivered are the foundation of these new regulations. However, unlike the other applications of ionising radiations, the principle of limitation of the dose delivered to the patient does not apply, owing to the health benefits derived by the patient, because a certain dose is required either to obtain a diagnostic quality image, or to obtain the desired therapeutic effect.