Increasing the public awareness of justification.

One of the requirements of the UK Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations 2017 is that all medical exposures must be justified, in that the benefit must have been determined to exceed the risk before the exposure can proceed. The field of medical exposure to ionising radiation is in the rare position of having this explicit legal requirement. In this article it is argued that, although separate information on benefit and risk is also required for implied or express informed consent prior to exposure, justification happens independently of this, is simple to explain, and is easily related to the commonly understood basis of medical ethics. It seems reasonable, therefore, to make patients and the public aware of the protection that UK law already provides for them. A proposal for a single-sentence general statement on justification is made.&#xD.