How Radiation Oncologists Can Champion World Radiotherapy Awareness Day

Ahead of World Radiotherapy Awareness Day (WRAD) on September 7, radiation oncology departments around the world are finding creative ways to engage colleagues, patients, and their communities. Sandra Turner, MBBS, PhD, a radiation oncologist and clinical professor at the University of Sydney and co-chair of WRAD, shared how her own department is marking the occasion.

Turner spoke with Brandon Mancini, MD, MBA, FACRO, host of RadOnc on the Run, about how radiation oncology professionals at any career stage can get involved. Mancini is the medical director at Bold Advanced Medical Future Health, a clinical associate professor in the Department of Radiology at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, and the editor at large for RadOnc Review, a supplement of the journal ONCOLOGY^®.

Hear the full conversation and learn more about World Radiotherapy Awareness Day here.

Transcript:

Mancini: As radiation oncologists listening, whether medical students, residents, or [practicing] physicians, how can we become better ambassadors for our specialty within our own hospitals and multidisciplinary teams?

Turner: I’m not saying that joining WRAD is going to be the whole answer, but I think [it involves] joining the mailing list and becoming a regional champion if you’re interested. In North America—Canada and the US—we don’t have many regional champions on board yet, and maybe that’s because people think we don’t have such a big problem with radiotherapy in our countries. But I guess it all depends on degree. It’s a platform to meet people, to get resources, and to think about ideas.

Even coming up to this [WRAD], we’ve got many physical and virtual requests. In our own department, our radiation therapists have really jumped on board. We’re having a morning tea. We’re inviting our local hospital media in, who are very excited about it. We’re having donuts with little red flags and a quiz on the back. We’ve got posters we can print that are on the website for public-facing areas, and we’re folding origami cranes. There’s a story about the peace and good luck that’s supposed to come from having 1000 cranes, from a very sad origin: the Hiroshima bombing and a young woman who died of leukemia. But that idea of hope and peace is something our staff and patients have jumped on board with. We’ve already got more than 1000 cranes around the waiting room in our pretty WRAD colors, and we’re going to hang them; it’s going to make for beautiful pictures and fantastic social media [posts]. That’s the sort of thing you can do on a fairly small scale: engage a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise know what the problem is, and help them feel like they can be part of the solution.

We’re also having a more high-level event through the University of Sydney, where some of the physicists are talking about some major radiotherapy innovations that they are working on. In the evening, we’ve got a careers night [for children] in their later years of education who may have an interest in health or the technical side of radiotherapy physics, or who might want to become doctors but don’t know anything about radiation oncology. All the local high schools in our area were invited, and within a week of going out, we’d filled all the places. There’s nothing like seeing the amazing, high-tech, beautiful facilities and incredible machine—the rapid evolution of our technology—and how quickly and well patients are treated. A picture paints 1000 words when it comes to understanding how radiotherapy is so different from many other treatments in our health system.