COVID RT
Research type
Research Study
Full title
COVID RT - Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Radiotherapy in the UK
IRAS ID
287136
Contact name
David Sebag-Montefiore
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 11 months, 28 days
Research summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on cancer patients and cancer services across the UK. During the peak of the pandemic, radiotherapy services across the UK continued to treat cancer patients in often challenging circumstances and implemented significant changes to standard practice in order to minimise the risks to patients of contracting COVID-19 and focus radiotherapy resources where they were most needed. The scale of these changes in radiotherapy practice, the clinical decision making underpinning them and their impact on cancer patient outcomes is unknown. This study, COVID-RT, is aimed at understanding the impact of COVID-19 on both radiotherapy patients and the radiotherapy service at a national scale.
The project involves the collection of data at individual radiotherapy providers (centres/hospitals) to understand clinical decisions and treatment delivery across the Uk during the pandemic. Eighty-seven percent of UK radiotherapy Centres have collected this information between March and August 2020 and will continue for selected tumour sites where there are persistent changes in radiotherapy practice as a result of the first wave of the pandemic. Further data collection for all tumour sites will be considered if, or when, there is a second peak of COVID-19 infections across the UK.
COVID RT is now seeking to create a secure central repository where locally collected COVID RT data can be centrally compiled for analysis and linkage to national datasets including cancer registration, hospital discharge datasets, systemic anticancer therapy data (SACT) and the Radiotherapy Dataset (RTDS). This linkage is crucial to evaluate the impact of changes in radiotherapy treatments during the pandemic on patient outcomes. The outputs from COVID RT will be important to assess the true impact of COVID-19 on patient outcomes and, critically, to inform the response to future waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and/or future pandemics.REC name
East of England - Cambridge East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/EE/0247
Date of REC Opinion
27 Oct 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion