Radiation Oncology Safety Course report - PDF Version

ESTRO endorsed course

2-5 September 2019, Dublin, Ireland

During this course endorsed by the European SocieTy for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO), an international and multidisciplinary group of radiation oncologists, medical physicists and radiation therapy technologists increased their knowledge of the ever-evolving subject of safety science in radiation oncology.

The course provided different viewpoints regarding risk and incident management, and safety science in general. As a group, we learned about and practised different ways to handle risk assessments, such as the “bow-tie” method, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and systems theoretic process analysis (STPA). We also learned how to handle and analyse incidents. Examples were shared by departments and taken from newspapers to be considered as cases to study. At an early stage of the course, a good base on safety science basics was formed by covering examples such as the “Swiss cheese” model. More innovative insights into safety science such as those included in “safety 2” were briefly covered throughout the rest of the course.

The course participants came from multiple disciplines from different countries and brought different levels of experience in the fields of safety and quality management. This made the course educational both through the lectures and through the inputs from the different students. This combined with the above-mentioned lectures and the patient perspective presented at the end of the course made sure that everyone returned home with a lot of new information to use on their own!­­­

Jesse Clarijs– de Jong

Holland Proton Centre

JH Delft, The Netherlands