Nicola Rosenfelder
Completion date: 2010
Nicola is a Specialist Registrar in Clinical Oncology, currently working at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. She completed her MSc in Oncology at the ICR in 2010, and she found the course particularly inspirational: “I always knew I was interested in research and wanted to spend some time pursuing a particular area of interest. The MSc course heightened this wish, and gave me tools to do so. After completing my MSc thesis I started an MD(Res) at the ICR, which I am now writing up, having returned to full-time clinical work at Guy’s and St Thomas’.”
Her research interests reside in Image Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT). Her dissertation for the MSc focused on technical advances in imaging to improve the accuracy of cranial radiotherapy. The availability of a specific imaging system called ExacTrac at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, where Nicola was working while carrying out her MSc, sparked her interest in this investigation.
As a result of this, and subsequent research carried out as part of Nicola’s MD(Res) thesis, changes have been made to the delivery of treatment at The Royal Marsden, improving patient comfort and reducing the cost of treatment.
Nicola felt that the course provided a great atmosphere to learn, with a high standard of teaching from national leaders in each subject and good access to resources: “The first and second year taught courses were excellent, especially in areas that were new to most of us as year 1 registrars, such as Cell & Molecular Biology and Physics. They covered the fundamentals of oncology in a very ordered way and it was good to have structured teaching from experts in the field.
It was also a good opportunity to learn about areas you would otherwise not cover though peer-led teaching and it was very useful to get full online access to journals and software such as reference managers. The course also provided practical teaching sessions, and the statistics and IT sessions were invaluable.” Nicola felt well supported throughout her time at the ICR: “I felt like the supervisors really wanted people to pass the course, and would be there to help if needed.”
In addition, the course provided Nicola with a chance to meet with people in similar positions from other hospitals and gain from their input: “Three of us revised together for our part two FRCR exam and visited patients in each of our hospitals. While revising we discussed different management techniques for the same diseases and looked at the evidence to support these different approaches. It was a great way to see that there is more than one way of managing a patient or disease and that different approaches were acceptable. This turned out to be extremely useful for the exam.”
