ESTRO Annual Report 2018

• Representatives of the RTT committee and ESTRO School met with ESCO, the European Commission service that identifies and categorises skills, competences, qualifications and occupations relevant for the EU labour market and education and training. The meeting focused on the importance of the professional recognition of the professions working in RT for the benefit of the patients. • Thanks to the inclusion of an ESTRO expert in the panel of speakers, ESTRO provided insight at the European Commission conference “Addressing Societal Challenges Through Advancing the Medical, Industrial and Research Applications of Nuclear and Radiation Technology” happening in March 2018 in Brussels

E²-RADIatE : Collection of real world data of patients treated with radiotherapy

Despite being very effective and widely used, radiation therapy still suffers from a lack of collective knowledge on how these treatments affect patients’ survival, functioning, symptoms and quality of life. Such information is available through the outcome of clinical trials, but formal data-sharing is rather haphazard, particularly where new treatments, techniques and technologies are involved. With the advent of personalized cancer medicine, this means that patients may not always receive the most ef­fective treatment for their particular case. In a bid to put this situation to rights, ESTRO and EORTC have joined forces to launch a new initiative, E2-RADIatE. E2-RADIatE is an infrastructure for research and data collection. It aims to support collaboration between radiation oncology professionals to generate robust data on the role of radiation therapy in cancer treatment and to further develop and integrate the discipline into therapeutic strategies. E2-RADIatE will serve as an umbrella for multiple cohort studies that will prospectively collect real world data to support radiotherapy research. The first two cohorts within E2-RADIatE will be OligoCare (Radical radiotherapy for oligometastatic disease) and ParticleCare (Evaluation of particle therapy:protons/ions).

Global Impact: Radiotherapy in Oncology (GIRO)

The Global Impact on Radiation Oncology survey, was launched in February 2018 to investigate a first international patterns of care study in radiation oncology with the aim to evaluate the use of hypofractionated external beam radiotherapy in the treatment of breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer and bone metastases. The survey has been translated in in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Over 2000 responses have been collected worldwide and the results will be presented at various conferences, as well as published in an article.

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