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Fostering a research culture is a key goal of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists yet there has never been an organisation-wide enquiry into the extent to which this is being realised, nor has there been in corresponding societies overseas. The purpose of this work was to comprehensively address that deficit for the Radiation Oncology (RO) Faculty to serve as a baseline for future comparison, given that the College’s Research Action Plan is being updated in 2022. The hypothesis was that such a culture is closer to fact than fantasy, acknowledging that this is a subjective call in the absence of comparative data.

With College approval, three de-identified Excel spreadsheets detailing 25 research-related sub-categories of the Faculty’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) database were interrogated for the 2019-21 triennium, accepting that research activity in 2020-21 would be COVID-19 suppressed. Denominators were defined as the numbers of ROs required to self-report CPD each year, namely 482, 496 and 511, respectively. Primary endpoints were the percentages claiming at least one activity overall, and in each of the sub-categories individually, by year. Secondary endpoints were the “breadth” (number of sub-categories claimed per individual) and “depth” (percentages solely claiming one of four lower-level activities scoring only 1 point per unit eg. trial patient recruitment, session chair), by year.

ROs claimed in 23/25 sub-categories. The percentages of individuals claiming at least one of these activities were 71%, 44%, and 62% in 2019-21, respectively, reflecting the COVID-19 effect. The median number of sub-categories claimed by these ROs was 2 (range 1-10) each year. The commonest activity each year was journal article co-author (25%, 16% and 27%, respectively). For 2019, the most representative year, there were noteworthy percentages publishing (25% co-authors, 10% first authors), actively participating in conferences (15% invited lecturers, 12% oral or poster presenters, 5% session chair/panel members, 4% keynote speakers), leading clinical trials (14% principal, 11% co-investigators), and peer reviewing manuscripts (14%). The percentages of ROs solely claiming only one lower-level activity were 5.2%, 4.4% and 5.9% in 2019-21, respectively.

Given that reporting all (or indeed any) research related CPD is not mandatory, these creditable results almost certainly underestimate the true level of engagement. Therefore, a culture of research is arguably more fact than fantasy in Australian and New Zealand RO. It is likely that Faculty curriculum requirements, research funding and other promotional initiatives have contributed substantively to this. This overview will be repeated in several years to evaluate the success of the new Research Action Plan and it is hoped that it may also stimulate comprehensive assessment of research engagement in other healthcare settings.