By Vvon Engineering Team | Published | Updated
Package selection, source and transport authorisations, consignor responsibilities, documentation and delivery planning for radioactive material in Bangladesh.
Nuclear medicine RFQ checklist (TXT)
Most hospitals think of themselves as receivers of radioactive material and not as shippers. Then a sealed source needs to go back to the supplier, a therapy dose has to move between two hospitals under the same trust, a generator has to be returned, or a decayed source has to leave the site. At that moment the hospital becomes the consignor, and the consignor carries most of the legal duties in the transport chain.
Confirm the transport requirements, authorisations and modal rules applicable in Bangladesh with BAERA and the competent parties. IAEA SSR-6 Revision 2 is the 2025 international edition, but publication does not by itself establish its date of national or modal adoption. This article supports procurement planning and is not a consignment-compliance checklist.
The duties split three ways, and a hospital can occupy any of the three positions on a given day.
Two authorisation questions have to be answered before the first shipment rather than during it: what your facility licence permits you to consign, and whether the carrier is authorised to carry class 7 goods. A courier who ordinarily moves pharmaceuticals is not automatically permitted to move radioactive material, and finding that out at the loading bay is expensive.
Packages fall into a small number of types, and which one you need is driven by the activity and the form of the contents rather than by how heavy the shielding looks.
A Type A package requires documented compliance for the specified contents and conditions. Such a package may include a correctly designed inner shield and outer carton and may be assembled from its approved components; appearance or assembly location does not decide compliance. Obtain the design documentation and operating instructions and confirm that the proposed source is within scope.
Whatever the type, three preparation steps are the consignor's and are frequently skipped. The contents have to be secured so they cannot move inside the package. The closure has to be secured in a way that shows if it has been opened. And the outside of the package has to be checked for removable contamination before it leaves, using the technique described in choosing and using survey meters and contamination monitors.
Marking, labelling and documentation depend on the package and contents classification. Excepted packages have different provisions from packages requiring category I-WHITE, II-YELLOW or III-YELLOW labels. Have a trained consignor establish the requirements rather than apply every marking to every package.
For relevant packages, the transport index is derived from the maximum dose rate at one metre using the prescribed calculation, including rounding and any applicable factors. Surface dose rate and transport index help determine category, subject to other conditions. Use the current adopted rules for limits and exceptions rather than rely on a simplified formula alone.
Apply the labels and measured or calculated information required for the classified package, using the package in its transport condition. Content activity is not normally obtained from a survey-meter reading on the outer box. Record the basis for activity, dose-rate and contamination entries separately.
The transport document is the item most often incomplete, and it is the item a checkpoint asks for. It should identify the UN number and proper shipping name, the class, the radionuclide, the physical and chemical form, the activity, the category of the package, the transport index, and the package type together with any certificate reference. Alongside it travel the consignor's declaration that the consignment is properly classified, packaged, marked and labelled, and written emergency instructions for the driver.
Provide emergency information that the carrier can understand and the applicable rules require, with a working contact arrangement. Agree and exercise the contact test with responsible staff; do not make unsolicited out-of-hours calls a routine procurement test.
At the receiving end, the record should show the time of arrival, the surface dose rate and the transport index measured on receipt, the contamination check, the assayed activity against the certificate, and the name of the person who did it. That record is also the department's first line of defence if a consignment turns out to have been mislabelled upstream, and it feeds directly into the source ledger described in radiopharmaceutical supply and logistics.
The road plan must account for transit duration, temperature, load restraint, security and trained receipt as well as package compliance. Allocate each task to the responsible consignor, carrier or consignee.
A two-hour delay for a six-hour-half-life radionuclide leaves about 79% of the activity available at the planned time, a loss of about 21%, before other constraints are considered. Product expiry or storage excursions may make the delivery unusable regardless of remaining activity. Confirm vehicle, restraint, security, temperature and receiving arrangements against the approved transport and product requirements.
One further habit is worth adopting. Keep a copy of every consignment's documents and survey readings in a single file, in date order, for as long as the regulator requires. When a query arrives about a shipment from eighteen months ago, and eventually one does, the department that can produce the file in ten minutes has a very different conversation from the department that cannot.
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