Faculty members
Philipp Scherer, Colette Dijcks, Mikki Campbell, Aidan Leong

Keywords
RTT education core curriculum, benchmarking standards, competency and proficiency, clinical decision making, communication, management skills, professionalism and clinical placement models.

Motivation
In the last decade, there have been rapid changes and progressive developments in the technology used for planning and delivery of radiotherapy (RT). Besides of implementing the latest technology with cutting edge equipment, it is essential that education programmes and curriculum are customised for radiation therapists (RTTs).

The education curriculum should be academically rigorous to enable graduate RTTs to work at the required current level of competency clinically; RTTs need to be proficient to adapt to the inevitable technical developments in RT. Due to further automation and an increased innovation speed, the competencies will shift from a more performing expertise to more controlling and decision making. This requires other competencies and therefore different education programmes are necessary  

Despite that RTT graduate competences have been comprehensively defined in the ESTRO European Qualifications Framework (EQF) level 6 benchmarking document since 2014, there are still disparities in RTT professional recognitions and education standards across Europe. This diverse situation can cause sub-optimal definitions of RTT scopes of practice and inferior quality of RTT education programmes in some European countries with a negative impact on its professional status, leading to difficulties in recruitment and retention.

The proposed output of this workshop will be a position paper on investigating the impact of ESTRO benchmarking standards on current RTT education core curriculum.