EURAMED rocc-n-roll involves seven interdependent work packages covering all tasks and deliverables vital to the project’s success.
The primary objective of WP1 is to ensure the most effective overall legal, contractual, administrative and financial management of the project. WP1 aims to provide efficient, participatory decision-making and effective day-to-day management of the project. In addition, WP1 encompasses the coordination of the project governance, including management of all consortium-internal and external bodies and related meetings with particular emphasis on the workshops and panels, which are needed to generate the consensus for the SRA and related documents. WP1 ensures the quality and timeliness of project progress and results, while addressing risk planning and management of ethical issues. Furthermore, dissemination, stakeholder engagement and outreach activities as well as exploitation and knowledge management are coordinated by WP1 in concert with other WPs.
The specific aims are to:
The objective of WP2 is to elaborate the ideas of the European radiation protection research platforms which are not primarily dealing with the medical radiation protection field (MELODI, EURADOS, SHARE, ALLIANCE, NERIS), but with radiobiology, radiation dosimetry, social sciences and humanities, radioecology and preparedness for nuclear accidents, in the context of medical applications of ionising radiation and the corresponding radiation protection. In addition, WP2 aims to analyse the ideas and concepts of the SAMIRA project and MEDICIS project and those of regulators as regards the application of ionising radiation in medicine. The interlinks and interests of these platforms and groups regarding the EURAMED rocc-n-roll SRA and subsequent roadmap will be identified and deliverables will be developed that will feed into WP6.
The specific aims are to:
Work Package 3: The health perspective and risk benefit approach
The primary objective of WP3 is to ensure the inclusion of a broad health perspective of application of ionising radiation and RP in the project, including an in-depth analysis of the EC health and Euratom programmes (see bullet below). WP3 aims to provide efficient participation of the different areas in healthcare to be considered in the risk benefit approach and relying on health issues where application of ionising radiation is most relevant for patient care but also in terms of RP. WP3 aims to focus on the disease areas most relevant in terms of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches based on ionising radiation and potential RP issues and to provide its findings and conclusions as input to WP6.
The specific aims are to:
The primary objective of WP4 is to analyse existing infrastructures relevant for the applications of ionising radiation in medicine and related RP research and aims to address the need for new infrastructures and related RP research. This will include the development of a dedicated scheme to perform a SWOT analysis for potential centres of excellence in the field of medical applications of ionising radiation. Moreover, WP4 aims to assess the impact of digitalization in healthcare on medical applications and related radiation protection and to address the opportunities, challenges and caveats of AI applications and advances in electronic patient records in medical applications and related RP. Another objective of WP4 is to deal with the question how ethics and data protection issues related to medical applications and RP research need to be addressed in future projects.
The specific aims are to:
The objective of WP5 is to analyse the research needs for innovation in radiation based high-quality healthcare across Europe and foster interactions between industry and academia research as well as clinical practitioners to reach such high-quality healthcare in a sustainable manner.
Patient-specific therapies are considered to increase both specificity and safety of therapeutic medicine in general, and this is especially valid for ionising radiation-based diagnosis and therapy. New diagnostic imaging technologies, molecular imaging methods, interventional procedures, image guided radiotherapy and e.g., theranostic-based nuclear medicine therapy offer unique opportunities. These innovations as many others have led and are leading to improved cure rates, however, the transfer into clinical daily routine throughout Europe is not fully achieved. The prerequisites need to be addressed that allow direct interactions between clinicians, academic research groups and industrial research groups to ensure approaches for sustainable, most successful healthcare as well as economic benefit to the European people and its industry. A major challenge for medical radiation applications and protection research is thus the effective translation of outputs to industry, into wider clinical practice, and into education and training programmes. Future research must ensure that steps are taking to facilitate translation. Thus, the main focus of WP5 will be how this can be achieved in future research projects.
The objective of WP6 is to bring together the results of WPs 2 to 5 and 7. A consensus has to be derived on the overall structure as well as on the general contents of the SRA, roadmap and the document that describes the interlinks with research platforms in the RP field but also with the approaches in the health sector and the digitisation programmes. Its main objective is to generate the above-mentioned documents.
The specific aims are to:
The objective of WP7 is to develop a methodological framework and guidance document on how to organise, implement and disseminate the education and training (E&T) in medical RP amongst health professionals and how to include E&T in all research projects to enable researchers a sound knowledge base of the science required for RP research, to build capacity in RP research and ensure sustainability of the field, including the link with industry regarding new technological developments, from a RP perspective.
This will serve as a strategy to establish a harmonised and sustainable safety culture in RP amongst health professionals/researchers, as well as engaging younger/new generations in this field of research. The output of WP7 will be integrated into the deliverables of WP6.
The specific aims are to:
This project has received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2019-2020 under grant agreement No 899995.