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Doe's quality system program: cooperative development and implementation.

Implementation of a Quality Systems approach to making defensible environmental program decisions depends upon multiple, interrelated components. Often, these components are developed independently and implemented at various facility and program levels in an attempt to achieve consistency and cost savings. The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) focuses on three primary system components to achieve effective environmental data collection and use. (1) Quality System guidance, which establishes the management framework to plan, implement, and assess work performed; (2) A Standardized Statement of Work for analytical services, which defines data generation and reporting requirements consistent with user needs; and (3) A laboratory assessment program to evaluate adherence of work performed to defined needs, e.g., documentation and confidence. This paper describes how DOE-EM fulfills these requirements and realizes cost-savings through participation in interagency working groups and integration of system elements as they evolve.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The radiochemist's role in the quality evaluation and assessment of radiological data in environmental decision making.

The quality evaluation and assessment of radiological data is the final step in the overall environmental data decisionprocess. This quality evaluation and assessment process is performed outside of the laboratory, and generally the radiochemist is not involved. However, with the laboratory quality management systems in place today, the data packages of radiochemical analyses are frequently much more complex than the project/program manager can effectively handle and additionally, with little involvement from radiochemists in this process, the potential for misinterpretation of radiological data is increasing. The quality evaluation and assessment of radiochemistry data consists of making three decisions for each sample and result, remembering that the laboratory reports all the data for each analyses as well as the uncertainty in each of these analyses. Therefore, at the data evaluation and assessment stage, the decisions are: (1) is the radionuclide of concern detected (each data point always has a number associated with it?); (2) is the uncertainty associated with the result greater than would normally be expected; and (3) if the laboratory rejected the analyses is there serious consequences to other samples in the same group? The need for the radiochemist's expertise for this process is clear. Quality evaluation and assessment requires the input of the radiochemist particularly in radiochemistry because of the lack of redundancy in the analytical data. This paper describes the role of the radiochemist in the quality assessment of radiochemical data for environmental decision making.

Data Collection↗