Working Towards Safer Healthcare Delivery

This is an endorsed ESTRO course, which is based on the work of the ROSIS group. It is a 3 ½ day course which explores the occurrence of incidents in health services, in particular in radiotherapy, to assess their impact, methods of prevention, detection, correction and reporting. The aims of this course are to heighten awareness of the occurrence of incidents and near incidents in radiotherapy, also to achieve greater accuracy in radiotherapy through incident prevention and to encourage a culture of openness in relation to incidents. A combination of lectures and workshops are held, allowing participants to gain more practical experience. The course is normally held in May, and places are limited. See www.rosis.info for further information.

Treatment Planning For 3D Conformal Radiotherapy with a Focus on Positioning, Set-Up and Verification

http://www.estro-education.org/courses/Pages/Dublin2012.aspx

The course is aimed at RTT´s, junior physicists and trainee radiation oncologists with basic or little experience in treatment planning. 

The course consists of didactic lectures, interactive sessions and practical treatment planning sessions. Introductory lectures will be given on specified sites and participants will then discuss, plan and review practical clinical scenarios.  On the designated sites, participants will complete a range of 3D plans for presentation and discussion. This will facilitate a greater depth of understanding of both the planning and evaluation processes. Participants will be asked to provide details of clinical treatment planning scenarios from their individual departments as part of the interactive approach.

Best Practice in Radiation Oncology. A Workshop to Train RTT Trainers

http://www.estro-education.org/courses/Pages/ViennaRTT2012.aspx

This workshop is organised jointly with the IAEA and consists in two phases over a two-year period.

ESTRO in collaboration with the IAEA aims to select groups of 3 participants representing 10 different countries. Participants should represent the academic and clinical arms of the profession and where possible have strong links with the national society withing their country.

It has been successfully conducted in 2008-2009 and 2010-2011. The main aims are to encourage a greater focus on radiotherapy specific education in the national programmes for RTT's by supporting the implementation of the ESTRO Core Curriculum for RTT's through the development and delivery of short courses and to raise the professional profile of RTT's. To equip the RTT's with the skills necessary to design, organise, deliver and evaluate a course in their own language to RTT's in their own country; to promote the further development and increase the standard of education programmes for RTT's, to provide and accessible course for RTT's.

Quality and Risk Management - Part 1 - Risk Management & Patient Safety

http://www.estro-education.org/courses/Pages/Bruges2012.aspx

The course is aimed at radiation oncologists, medical physicists, RTT's and any other health professionals interested in risk management and patient safety.

This course is part of a two years cycle on quality management in radiotherapy, consisting of two complementary modules:

1. Part 1: Risk Management and Patient Safety - As described below, to be held from 15 till 18 November 2012

2. Part 2: Quality improvement and indicators - This second part of the cycle will be organised in 2013

Industrial and medical activities expose operator and/or customers and/or the general population to the risk of accidents that cause corporal or environmental damage (or both). Harm to operators is very uncommon in radiotherapy, but harm to patients happened in the past and got considerable press coverage in many European countries. These widely publicised accidents have focused the attention of both the radiotherapy house and the regulatory authorities on the appropriate preventive actions that could be taken to avoid their repetition.