Management of interruptions in radiotherapy treatments: Adaptive implementation in high workload sites

Abstract

Owing to predictable or unpredictable causes, interruptions may arise during therapy. On average, the extension of fractionated radiotherapy treatments is prone to be delayed by several weeks and interruptions can come up extending overall treatment time (OTT). Clonogenic cells of aggressive tumors might benefit from this situation, modifying local control (LC).

Preserving treatment quality in radiotherapy is an essential issue for the treatment outcome, and our institution is increasingly concerned about this line of work.

Establishing some objective criteria to schedule patients that have suffered interruptions along their treatments is of capital importance and not a trivial issue. Publications strongly encourage departments to minimize the effect of lag periods during treatments. Therefore, in July 2017, our facility implemented the so called ‘Protocol to Manage Interruptions in Radiotherapy’, based on a scoring system for patient categorization that considers not only histology but also associated comorbidity and sequence of the therapy.