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It has been a longstanding mission for ESTRO to encourage trainees in radiation oncology to have a shorter or longer stay abroad during their training and it is also recommended in the ESTRO core curriculum.

Since 2008, the ESTRO School have had a mobility grant for younger members applying for a shorter focused stay at another institution and preferably also in another country. Over the years, more than 600 members have applied and about 50% of the applications could be met. Having a rather high acceptance rate has been important for the EDC and thus the amount of money available have been adjusted to accommodate at least 50% of the applications. Unfortunately, the COVID pandemic has put the mobility grant on a temporary hold. The aim is to reintroduce it as soon as the economy and the pandemic allows us to do it.

It will be important for the future also to look at other initiatives and maybe the recent success with the Interact-Europe grant from the EU commission can be a jump start for other constellations securing the mobility across Europe. The project is led by ECO and most of the organisations under the ECO umbrella takes part. Interact-Europe will create a curriculum across cancer-related disciplines and will focus on what one discipline needs to know form other disciplines’ curricula. One of the aims is to secure online education but also to increase mobility. Hopefully, together with other initiatives, we will be able to support mobility – and not just from an economically point of view. The talk will go through some of these possibilities.