One Voice for Radiotherapy: Creating World Radiotherapy Awareness Day

As radiation oncology professionals, we know that radiotherapy is vital for curing cancer, alleviating symptoms, and improving a patient’s quality of life. Access to radiotherapy is directly linked to improved survival for many cancers. Radiotherapy is also a highly cost-effective cancer treatment. However, around the world, significant regional and national disparities persist. Reasons include inadequate services, geographical barriers, insufficient workforce and a lack of awareness of modern radiotherapy.

One way to overcome these disparities is to create a radiotherapy awareness day to provide a platform for the global radiotherapy community to join together and direct attention to the public, media and governments. Radiotherapy is a crucial treatment modality in oncology, utilized across various age groups, including children, young adults, and older adults, for the management of diverse cancer types.

The first-ever World Radiotherapy Awareness Day (WRAD) will launch on September 7, the date the first patient was treated on a linear accelerator. WRAD’s theme will be “One Voice for Radiotherapy”. The Day will include a number of approaches, including live and virtual events, social media promotions, print and broadcast announcements and stories in the media.

You might be wondering how we got to this point to have a global awareness day so the timeline is shown in the figure below, along with a new WRAD logo and branding.

We announced the concept of World Radiotherapy Awareness Day in November 2024, during London Global Cancer Week. The interest and committed support from the broader radiotherapy community was overwhelming. A planning meeting was then held in March of this year where the WRAD date, logo, theme and campaign messages were announced. The planning events were both in-person and virtual and also recorded to ensure true global participation. We had over 800 registrants from all over the world at the two meetings, a testament to the enthusiasm for the WRAD initiative.

An arrary of radiotherapy and oncology societies from around the world, including ALATRO, AORTIC, ASTRO, CACA, CARO, ESTRO, FARO, MESTRO, PROS, RCR, SIOP, radiotherapy professionals, and patient advocates, including ASTRO’s Director of Public Relations, Jeff White, spoke about the importance of radiotherapy and reinforced the need for a global awareness day.

To-date, dozens of professional radiotherapy societies have joined the WRAD movement and are planning ways they can get their members involved and raise more awareness about RT. We’ve also secured significant sponsorship from industry partners, but of course we need more to ensure WRAD’s long term sustainability.

The next steps will be finalizing a WRAD website, social media channels and finalizing resources for participants. We are also planning events and promotion of WRAD at major oncology conferences happening in the months leading up to the September launch.

We ask you to please show your support for this important initiative via the link in this article to receive updates and be part of the WRAD family. We hope you and your radiotherapy teams will get involved to make this inaugural WRAD an overwhelming success. Please talk about WRAD, share with your colleagues and think about what your clinic or institution will do to promote WRAD on September 7th, 2025.

We believe that WRAD’s global reach and inclusive approach position it as a unifying movement to champion the lifesaving and life-improving potential of radiotherapy. Please join us!

Written by Katie Wakeham and Sandra Turner, Co-Chairs World Radiotherapy Awareness Day (WRAD) Committee

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