ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S142

Invited Speaker

ESTRO 2025

and have led to improvements or changes in routine clinical care. The most notable recent change being reduced overall treatment times for prostate and breast cancer patients.

International approaches to RT QA for multi-institutional clinical trials have historically been developed independently. By harmonising these approaches through the Global Quality Assurance of Radiation Therapy Clinical Trials Harmonization (GHG) Group, international collaboration in clinical trials involving radiotherapy can be significantly enhanced and standardised. There is a growing demand for collaboration between different groups and disciplines conducting clinical trials to ensure adequate statistical power to broaden the acceptance of trial results and providing meaningful impact in the clinical setting. Defining the optimal approach to RT QA implementation, reporting and data collection for clinical trials will improve the validity of trial results, facilitate comparison of cross trial results and provide valuable data for future research and analysis. The inclusion of RT QA programmes as part of radiotherapy clinical trial design has impacted not only the standard of radiotherapy delivered within clinical trials but also accelerated the general uptake of high-quality radiotherapy techniques improving outcomes for patients more widely.

4899

Speaker Abstracts Generating value together: opportunities and challenges Ina Jürgenliemk-Schulz Radiation Oncology, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands

Abstract: It is the joint major interest of the ESTRO community to offer the best radiation treatment to all patients with cancer in Europe and beyond. This aim is reflected in the ESTRO vision 2030: “Radiation Oncology. Optimal Health for All, Together”. In the Cambridge Dictionary we can find term “Value” defined as “The Importance or Worth of Something for Someone”. In the first place “Optimal Health” is of importance and highly valuable for our patients but it is also the final goal for the ESTRO community. Improving patients’ health is the most important value shared by all health care providers, teachers, researcher, and members of all professions, jointly volunteering, and working in ESTRO. We can achieve this goal in partnerships aiming to optimize our treatments through innovations, research, education, and cooperation. As a result, we are jointly creating and increasing value. However, to accomplish it we need a network of interested people, a frame to bring these people together and to facilitate communication and cooperation, a vision supported by members and a structure that supports disseminating results, knowledge, and achievements. We can find such spread all over the large ESTRO community. In networks as big as ESTRO, however, division and subdivision into smaller platforms and networks is mandatory to focus on the quite different and special aspects of our professions. The brachytherapy part of our society is represented by the GEC-ESTRO committee and its subdivisions into working groups for different tumour sites and brachytherapy physics. For 25 years, different working groups have been initiated in GEC ESTRO and these groups developed steadily. These working groups are regularly subdivided into taskforces concentrating in depth on specific aspects to increase our understanding of disease, radiation planning and delivery, including research, teaching, guidelines, and recommendations. The GEC-ESTRO working groups have been jointly creating value in terms of improving brachytherapy as modern treatment modality, either alone or in various combinations with external beam irradiation and/or systemic treatments. On the other hand, these working groups feed into larger networks, including recently founded ESTRO focus groups. Networks like ours live from the inclusion of many different volunteers in various stages of their professional lives and with their different ideas and potentials. They all offer their free time and knowledge, which both are values in themselves. We must be aware and grateful for their motivation, as financial resources are often limited, especially in rare cancers and rare clinical scenarios. Within the growing ESTRO society it is not always easy to foster a successful interactive group process and to become as inclusive as desirable and intended but we should never give up achieving these aims. It should be acknowledged