Careers in radiotherapy
Blog
Published:
13 October 2022
This initiative focused on awareness and promotion of the therapeutic radiographer career and role in the cancer pathway. Jo McNamara and Hazel Pennington were appointed for 12 months as Macmillan Clinical Fellows, funded by Health Education England with support from the Society of Radiographers, to work on this initiative.
The initiative
This initiative was set up in 2021 for 12 months to:
- promote therapeutic radiography as a career
- increase recruitment to pre-registration courses
- raise awareness of therapeutic radiographer role with other healthcare professionals, public and cancer charities’
- support career development of therapeutic radiographers in non-traditional roles.
What we did
- Hosted careers events for range of potential therapeutic radiography pre-registration applicants.
- Hosted webinars on non-traditional roles for therapeutic radiographers and the future of radiotherapy.
- Produced conference presentations and publications.
- Engagement with Macmillan professionals across the country, raising profile of therapeutic radiographers and further potential within the cancer pathway.
- Support development of Macmillan online training offer for Cancer Prehabilitation and Rehabilitation programme (PRosPer).
- Audited northwest centres on perception of role of therapeutic radiographer role in prehab/rehab and evaluation of online learning. Presented findings nationally.
- Created a patient-focused film highlighting importance of therapeutic radiographer.
Impact and outcomes
- Challenged stereotypes of the therapeutic radiographer role as someone that only delivers radiotherapy treatment.
- Inspired therapeutic radiographers in future career choices.
- Inspired applicants to apply for therapeutic radiography.
- PRosPeR online training has inspired a passion for prehab and rehab in therapeutic radiographers and helped develop an M level course that was created in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University and Macmillan.
- Started the Promotion and outreach Special Interest Group with the Society of Radiographers.
Future aims
- Continue to raise the profile of therapeutic radiographers.
- Continue to challenge oncology roles that are limited to nurses, for example, clinical nurse specialist roles or those roles monitoring charity helplines.
- Empower therapeutic radiographers to use their UCPC protected title and advocate for the profession.
Find out more
You can contact the team by emailing Hazel Pennington at hazel.pennington@LTHR.nhs.uk or Jo McNamara at joanna.mcnamara@shu.ac.uk.
You can find Hazel on Twitter @Pennington_haze or Jo on Twitter @SHURadiotherapy and Instagram via @Rad__Chat.
More information about the role of therapeutic radiographer can be found on the NHS' Health Careers website.
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