Why is September 7 World Radiotherapy Awareness Day?

World Radiotherapy Awareness Day falls on September 7 each year, marking the anniversary of the first patient treated with a modern linear accelerator in 1953 at Hammersmith Hospital in London. Sandra Turner, MBBS, PhD, a radiation oncologist and clinical professor at the University of Sydney, co-founded World Radiotherapy Awareness Day alongside Katie Wakeham, FRCR, PhD, a clinical oncologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and now serves as its co-chair.

Turner spoke with Brandon Mancini, MD, MBA, FACRO, host of RadOnc on the Run, about how her team landed on September 7 as the day’s official date. 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: I think I know the answer to this, but how was September 7 picked as World Radiotherapy Awareness Day?

Turner: Well, we went through a process, and one of our first engagement pieces, to get people involved with the planning before we got very far, was to have people give input on the day, the colors, and the logo. I think that helped people feel like this was their campaign. We didn’t want to be telling people what to do; we needed people to really embrace this as their own.

One of those pieces was putting forward some days. There were a few you’d know of: in November, Marie Curie’s birthday, the day X-rays were discovered, and various other events, but there’s quite a crush around that time with International Medical Physicist Day and various other things, so that seemed a bit crowded. We didn’t want it in the earlier part of the year, and when we spoke with the Union for International Cancer Control [UICC] and World Cancer Day, they were very keen to partner with us and completely understood the need for a separate day, but they said, “Don’t crowd it into the first part of the year, because we want World Cancer Day to stand out.”

We had the rest of the year, and then one of our physicist supporters, from the UK, said, “What about September 7?” That was the first day a patient was ever treated on a modern linear accelerator, in 1953, at Hammersmith Hospital in London. The second clinical linear accelerator [followed close behind], though it doesn’t look modern now. But the point was, this was a huge advance from the radioisotope and cobalt era, and it aligned nicely with our message: we don’t just want people to get any old radiotherapy, we want people to get world-class, modern, sophisticated, safe, high-quality radiotherapy, and we also need to support the highly trained workforce that can deliver it. It seemed to tick quite a few boxes, and it’s nicely separated from other days. That’s how the decision came about.