ABSTRACT
This chapter describes nuclear medicine and radiopharmaceutical misadministrations. It discusses the conventional wisdom as to the cause of radiopharmaceutical misadministrations and notes that a human factors perspective might lead to a more useful understanding of what's wrong. Nuclear medicine involves the purposeful injection, ingestion, or inhalation of material containing a small amount of radioactivity. Most often the medical need is diagnostic, and the selection of radiopharmaceutical, dosage, and route of administration depends on the bodily structure or function about which information is required. Moreover, failure to perform a nuclear medicine task successfully can lead to a radiopharmaceutical misadministration. At least implicit in every cooking and nuclear medicine task are subtasks and task elements that reflect the need not just to use the equipment but to control and monitor that use in a way that ensures success of the entire performance.
