ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S4259

RTT - Education, training, advanced practice and role developments

ESTRO 2025

Material/Methods: An exploratory survey consisting of 23 questions was developed for RTTs with the support of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was then distributed through pre-existing educational social channels, including a WhatsApp group consisting of 450 RTT professionals in Latin America, and allowed a snowball effect for sharing the survey with peers. We then formed a 14-member multinational team of RTT professionals from Latin America, to review, interpret, update, and organize the results and consolidate the names of the training institutions reported. Additionally, each member worked within their country to find online or collect a copy of each institution’s curricular program. These were reviewed to verify, update, and identify further characteristics about RTT training. Results: We gathered 367 individual responses from RTTs in 18 countries. There was general concordance among respondents regarding the details of their training institutions. Among and building upon these responses, our team then identified 174 training institutions and curricula available either as pdf documents or online. These consisted of universities, schools, centers and institutes, of which 68.4% were public. A formal university title was present in 62.9% of the degrees issued, including “Técnico” (41.5%), “Tecnólogo” (36.8%), “Licenciado” (20.5%) and “Diplomado” (1.2%). The distribution of degrees by country can be seen in Figure 1 .

Among program curricula (89 pdf documents and 85 online information), only 29 (16.4%) contained a specific, dedicated training program in radiotherapy, whereas the others contain radiotherapy as a subtopic within other specialties. Significant differences in length of training were observed between countries, even for the same degrees (see Figure 2 ), with a mean of 3.1 years. Clinical rotations in radiotherapy were heterogeneously mandatory versus optional.