The North West Cancer Centre opened in November 2016, establishing a radiotherapy centre in the north west of the island of Ireland for the first time. When developing the service it was decided to implement and maintain state of the art treatments from the outset. All radical treatments and many palliative treatments are therefore routinely delivered with IMRT/VMAT and supported by daily IGRT. It was therefore important to implement a robust end-to-end QA solution that could match the technical demands of the treatment techniques. This was particularly important given that the centre had no “QA history” and therefore the safety and quality of its services were being benchmarked for the first time.

This presentation will describe the implementation of the SNC SunCheck system for patient focused QA as part of an integrated QA solution. This includes an independent dose calculation, pre-treatment verification of intended dose delivery and then tracking the dose delivered to the patient at each fraction of external beam radiotherapy. Machine QA will also be considered alongside the role of SunCheck in the overall physics departmental quality management system.

Learning objectives:
•    Consider how the importance of end-to-end QA solutions.
•    Understand where gaps in QA processes or assumptions regarding dependencies of QA processes on each other can result in both false positives and false negatives.
•    Explore how to satisfy the new requirement of the recently updating Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations that exposures to “target volumes are individually planned and their delivery appropriately verified”.