CoR Conference leads delegates into the Age of Radiotherapy

Therapeutic radiographers gathered in Birmingham for the College of Radiographers’ Annual Radiotherapy Conference. Held over three days, the event explored advances in technology, service delivery and patient care, giving delegates the opportunity to network and share good practice.

Last year’s event saw the launch of the Year of Radiotherapy, a campaign to raise awareness of radiotherapy and promote it as a modern effective treatment for cancer. Tim Cooper, from the National Cancer Action Team, opened proceedings with an update on the campaign's progress.

Tim said: “It has been a successful year and I think you’ll agree that we achieved a lot, but we still have a long way to go and we shouldn’t take our foot off the gas – we need to continue pushing ahead.”

A survey at the beginning of the campaign showed that the public had a poor awareness of the treatment and perceived it as ‘frightening’ and ‘gruelling’. The campaign sought to change those views with three key messages: Radiotherapy cures cancer; Radiotherapy is cost-effective; and Radiotherapy is cutting edge treatment.

After a year of activities, which included MP briefings, a round-table discussion and lots of publicity, the survey was repeated. Explaining the results, Tim said: “We have begun to see a change. It is not a big change – a couple of percentage points for each individual question. Individually, the changes do not signify much but every single question showed a  shift towards a more positive view of the services. I think we have begun to sustain change in people’s minds. Because it is slow sustainable change, it will take time and we can not do it in just one year.”

Although the year is over, the work to raise the profile of radiotherapy has only just begun and Tim announced the next phase of the campaign, which will move the focus to local sustainability and ownership.

Heralding ‘The Age of Radiotherapy’, Tim urged delegates to get involved on a local level, to increase awareness with patients, commissioners, their community and local press.

Innovating paediatric care

The College was honoured to welcome colleagues from Australia to the conference. David Willis and David Tongs, of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, talked about a number of initiatives they have introduced to improve paediatric patient care. David  Willis said: “All of us in this field appreciate the issues that we face supporting children through the treatment process. There are different challenges and requirements at different time points but these all present opportunities to enact some supportive interventions.”

The children’s information book that the centre used was out-of-date and didn’t really work, so they decided to make their own. After securing funding from the Peter Mac Foundation, they worked with a children’s author and illustrator to produce a comic book which they could regularly update and customise for use in other centres. ‘Dr Dave and his Amazing Radiotherapy Machine’ uses age appropriate information to explain the treatment pathway and address issues that the children may face.

David Tongs described a variety of techniques that the centre has employed to engage the children and make visiting the centre more fun. Balloon art has proved particularly successful and cost effective at building and maintaining rapport with the children, also acting as a bribe for good behaviour. David treated the delegates to a live demonstration of building a giraffe.

A very popular and award-winning initiative has been the personalised movies that the ‘two Daves’ have made for the children as mementos of their treatment. They planned to update the centre’s paediatric information videos but their plans changed when they met Kate, a patient who pointed out that the videos would be much better if she appeared in them. Since then they have produced over 100 videos for children to use to help explain their experience to others. The movies are tailored to the individual child – the music and content is chosen to reflect the child’s personality and preferences.

An study of the initiative by the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Programme Evaluation found that the videos provided many benefits for the children, including distraction, improved willingness to receive treatment, more effective communication of their experience to others, and an improved sense of well-being.

Other successful techniques have included making the construction of immobilisation devices less traumatic, setting up a CCTV system to allow the patients to communicate with their family during treatment and organising activities, such as ferrari drives and trips to the fire station.

David Tong concluded: “We have demonstrated how therapeutic radiographers can use specialist clinical knowledge to lead the development and implementation of unique supportive interventions for children. We have also shown how these interventions can be applied at various time points during the treatment journey. It can take considerable effort and enthusiasm to do this but hopefully our presentation will get you thinking about your own practice.”

Kate’s father, David Collier, then took to the podium to describe the impact that childhood cancer has on the families of patients. David is Chief Executive of the Australian Institute of Radiography but attended the conference to discuss radiotherapy from a personal perspective. In an emotional presentation, he explained how the initiatives at the Peter MacCallum Centre had been invaluable to Kate and his family, making what was a very difficult time as pleasant as possible. He also highlighted the need for improved long-term support, to help families cope with the physical and psychological after-effects of treatment. 

Key messages

Summing up the three days, SCoR President Sue Johnson said: “As a diagnostic radiographer, I am quite overwhelmed at all the information and the draw on my emotions. 

“I was left with three main impressions of the event. As a practicing radiographer, the main thing that I will take away is that each and every patient interaction needs to matter. As the SCoR President, I am absolutely convinced that we need to continue to be fully aware of, influence, and be engaged in the national direction of services. On a personal level, the  most memorable, impacting and humbling experiences of the whole session was the presentations by the three Davids from Australia.”

A full report of the event will appear in the March issue of Synergy News.