The Collar You Trust Might Already Be Failing

I have to be honest about something before I even get into the detail of this one, which is that working alongside NZRad Solutions over the past while has genuinely been one of the privileges of my career, not because the subject matter is glamorous, because radiation shielding is about as far from glamorous as healthcare gets, but because I have had a front row seat to a team quietly closing a gap in patient and staff safety that has existed for decades, and getting to help tell that story properly has felt like a real honour rather than just another piece of client work.

Here is the gap, in plain terms. Every radiology department, cardiology catheter lab, and orthopaedic theatre in the country relies on a piece of equipment that almost nobody thinks about twice, and that is the lead apron or the thyroid collar, the heavy, faintly reassuring garment that staff pull on before stepping anywhere near an X-ray beam, trusting completely that the material inside it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. For decades that trust has gone almost entirely unquestioned, and understandably so, because there has never really been a simple, accessible way to actually verify it. You can see the collar sitting on its hook. You can feel the weight of it when you put it on. What you cannot do, and what nobody has really been able to do until now, is see what is actually happening inside the lead lining itself, whether it has cracked, thinned, or degraded in a way that is invisible from the outside but very real in terms of the protection it is no longer providing.

This is the exact problem NZRad Solutions has been solving, and the technology sitting at the centre of it is called FlowD, which does something that sounds almost deceptively simple once you understand what is actually going on underneath it. It scans radiation protective equipment, aprons, thyroid collars, and similar shielding garments, and it measures the real lead equivalent thickness of the material against recognised international standards, including DIN 6857-2 and IEC 61331. In plain language, it finally answers a question that clinical teams have never really been able to answer with confidence before, which is whether this specific piece of protective equipment, right now, today, is actually providing the level of shielding everyone in that room is assuming it provides.

And here is the part that really is the crux of the whole thing for me. Standard practice up until now has simply been to X-ray the garment for visible cracks, which tells you whether the lead lining has physically split or broken in a way you can see on a scan, but it has never actually told anyone whether the lead equivalency itself, the real shielding capacity of the material, was still what it should be. A collar can pass a crack check and still be quietly under protecting the person wearing it, because thinning and degradation do not always show up as a crack, and until FlowD there simply was not a way to measure that properly. That distinction sat with me for a long time after I first understood it properly, because once you factor in that radiation dose is cumulative, that it builds up in the body over years rather than resetting each shift, the idea of a garment quietly under protecting someone every single day, for years, without anyone knowing, is genuinely sobering. It certainly raised my eyebrows, and it left me thinking about the staff who put one of these collars on every morning assuming, entirely reasonably, that it was doing its job.

And this is the part that genuinely stopped me in my tracks the first time I sat with the data, because the answer has turned out to be far more confronting than most people in the industry would expect. Consolidated validation work across one Waikato hospital cardiology department and one Auckland radiology department found thyroid collar failure rates sitting at roughly forty eight to fifty percent, independently, at both sites, which means close to half of the thyroid collars tested were not delivering the protection everyone assumed they were providing, at two completely separate hospitals, using two completely separate equipment fleets, arrived at entirely independently of one another. When a finding repeats itself that consistently across unrelated sites, it stops being an unfortunate one off and starts being a pattern the whole sector genuinely needs to sit with.

What makes this feel so serious to me is exactly where thyroid collars sit in a person's radiation exposure over the course of a career, because the thyroid is one of the most radiosensitive organs in the body, and the staff most likely to be relying on that collar day after day, the cardiology nurses, the radiographers, the interventional cardiologists, and the cath lab technicians, are often the very same people standing closest to the beam for the longest cumulative hours across their entire working life. A collar quietly failing at around fifty percent effectiveness is not a paperwork issue sitting in a compliance folder somewhere. It is a slow, invisible accumulation of risk landing on the exact people whose job is to keep patients safe, and it has been happening inside departments that believed, entirely reasonably and in complete good faith, that their equipment was doing precisely what it was purchased to do.

This is exactly why lead equivalency measurement matters as much as it does, and why FlowD feels genuinely new to me rather than simply being a more convenient version of an old inspection process. For the first time, a hospital does not have to rely on visual inspection, manufacturer assurance, or the simple passage of time since a garment was last replaced, and can instead actually measure the real world protective capacity of each individual item, identify exactly which pieces have degraded and by how much, and make replacement decisions based on solid evidence rather than a hopeful assumption. That shift, from trusting the equipment to actually verifying it, is the same shift clinical governance has been trying to make across the rest of healthcare for years now, and it is genuinely satisfying to watch it finally reach a corner of the sector that had somehow been quietly overlooked for so long.

Being brought into the marketing, branding, education, and video content side of this work has meant sitting inside genuinely rigorous clinical validation research, helping pull findings from real hospital data into reports and content that speak clearly and honestly to the people who actually need to act on them, and helping shape a conversation that could so easily be misread as alarmist into what it actually is, which is an opportunity rather than a warning. The opportunity to protect staff who have been quietly under protected for years without anyone realising it. The opportunity to give hospitals a defensible, evidence based compliance position instead of a hopeful one built on assumption. And the opportunity to finally close a gap in radiation safety that has existed simply because the technology to measure it properly did not exist until a team like this one decided to build it.

Good medicine has always depended on trusting the equipment behind it, and for the first time, that trust can actually be checked rather than simply assumed, which is not a small thing at all. For the people standing in front of the beam every single day, doing work most of us will never fully appreciate, it might turn out to be one of the most important shifts radiation safety has seen in years, and I feel genuinely lucky to have had even a small part in helping that story reach the people who need to hear it.