Who is responsible for what, why a Type A package is a certified design rather than a lead pot in a box, how the transport index and the category labels are worked out, and the documents that have to travel with the consignment.
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.
Bangladesh applies transport requirements derived from the international regulations, administered by the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority. The structure below is stable across editions. The numerical thresholds are not, so read them from the current regulations and your authorisation rather than from any article, including this one.
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.
The point that gets missed is that a Type A package is a design that has been tested and documented, not a description of how sturdy something looks. A lead pot inside a cardboard carton with tape around it is not a Type A package even if the shielding is more than adequate, and a package assembled on site from parts is not one either. Nuclear Shields supply Type A packages built around tungsten containers with 20, 30 and 40 mm wall thicknesses, which is the form most hospital consignments take.
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.
Every package carries the identification of the consignor or consignee, the UN number and the proper shipping name. On top of that go the category labels, which are the part people find confusing because two separate measurements decide them.
The first is the dose rate at the surface of the package. The second is the transport index, which is defined as the maximum dose rate at one metre from the surface, expressed in millisieverts per hour and multiplied by one hundred. The category, running from the white label at the bottom through two grades of yellow, is set by whichever of those two measurements gives the higher category. That is why a small heavily shielded package and a large lightly shielded one can end up in different categories despite carrying similar activity.
Three practical rules follow. Labels go on two opposite sides of the package. The consignor fills in the radionuclide, the activity and, on the yellow labels, the transport index, from their own measurement rather than copying the supplier's figures. And the measurement is made on the package as it will actually travel, closed and sealed, not on the container before it goes into the outer packaging.
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.
Two things about the emergency instructions matter more than their existence. They have to be in a language the driver reads, which in Bangladesh means Bangla rather than an English form copied from a supplier. And the twenty four hour contact number on them has to be answered by somebody who can act, not by a switchboard that closes at five. Test it before the first consignment by ringing it at nine in the evening.
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.
Regulation covers the package. Bangladeshi roads cover everything else, and the failures on the road leg are consistent.
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.