Nataliya Kovalchuk, Clinical Professor at Stanford Radiation Oncology, shared on LinkedIn:
“We are coming to the end of our European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) -endorsed Brachy Terra/Help Ukraine Group (HUG) Cervical Cancer Brachytherapy Course for Ukraine, and we want to thank everyone who made this course possible.
A very special thank you to Primoz Petric and Christian Kirisits and the entire BrachyTerra faculty for sharing your expertise and giving so much of your time to our Ukrainian colleagues.
Thank you also to our wonderful Ukrainian speakers: Veronika Patsko, Serhii Brovchuk, Iryna Diakiv, Anna Kryzhnivska, Orysia Burak, Oleh Ovsiienko, and Maryna Sokolovska, Lesia Mytsak and Serhii Brovchuk for moderating the sessions and helping with so much work behind the scenes.
And a huge thank you to our volunteer translators: Serhii Mykhailiuk, Софія Залуська, Lesya Mytsak, Daryna Serhiichuk, Liudmyla Bordiuh, Lana Akhmed, Lydiia Sayan, Yuliia L., and Oksana Galias. Translating this amount of educational material took many, many hours. Your work made it possible for our Ukrainian colleagues to learn from international experts in their own language.
Most importantly, thank you to everyone who participated in the course. Continuing to learn, attend lectures and develop new clinical skills while living and working through a war takes an extraordinary commitment.
For those completing the course, all requirements must be completed by September 15:
- 100% of the asynchronous BrachyTerra lectures
- at least 80% of the live lectures
- final test score of ≥80%
And we are not finished yet!
The next step is hands-on training. October 12–14, 24 Ukrainian radiation oncologists and medical physicists will travel to Gliwice, Poland, for three days of practical training at the Maria Skłodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology.
We thank Piotr Wojcieszek for kindly hosting the Ukrainian participants. We will move from lectures to applicator insertion, contouring, treatment planning and optimization, QA, and clinical demonstrations of modern image-guided brachytherapy.
Thank you BrachyTerra, ESTRO, Swecare, our faculty, moderators, translators, volunteers, and participants for making this collaboration possible.
Step by step, we are building access to modern brachytherapy education and strengthening cancer care in Ukraine.”
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