The COVID RT Study

This Notice is to require the submission of data which will be used to understand the impact of COVID-19 on both radiotherapy patients and radiotherapy service providers.

The data collected will be used within a national evaluation initiative, the COVID RT Study, led by the National Cancer Research Institute Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy Research Working Group. 

During the pandemic, radiotherapy services 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.

This data collection is crucial to evaluate the scale of these changes in radiotherapy practice, the clinical decision making underpinning them and their impact on patient outcomes. The data collected will be shared by NHS England with Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in a pseudonymised form and will be held in the CRUK Trusted Research Environment for analysis by the COVID RT study team. 

This Notice is served on:

• those providers of NHS radiotherapy treatment services in England that have agreed to participate in the Study.

A list of these providers can be found in Appendix 1 of the Notice.

Providers should make one submission of the COVID RT data that they have collected on their systems between 1 March 2020 to 31 December 2020. Providers will be advised if a further submission of the data is required.

April 2023: Following agreement with the Royal Marsden Hospital, the required data will now be made available to NHS England in line with this published Notice. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

12 April 2023: This page has been updated to note the agreed, delayed submission of data by the Royal Marsden Hospital.