Therapy enquiry

All enquiries – whether by telephone, by email or with our contact form – are first processed by our Case Management. You can submit an enquiry yourself or have your family or your attending doctor submit this for you. A case manager will then advise you until the beginning of therapy. She will also inform you whether proton therapy is suitable for the treatment of your diagnosis.

If you have already submitted the relevant information together with your enquiry, our radio-oncologist immediately examines whether proton therapy could be a suitable option for you. If the documentation relating to your enquiry are not received or is incomplete and further information is required, your personal contact person from Case Management will contact you directly.

Enquiries and documentation submitted must be directed to the WPE in German or in English.

The following documentation is required for this initial control

•  A summarising medical report (with information about diagnosis and course of the disease)
•  Alternatively: the doctor’s and operation reports
•  Current CT or MRT images on CD/DVD, including the corresponding written diagnoses
•  Results of the biopsy (histological results)

As a rule, within one or two days you will receive an answer whether proton therapy can in principle be performed.

We then invite you – if you wish together with your family – to a two-day initial presentation. For this we need further documents. These can be found in this list.

Initial presentation

On the first day one of our team doctors will discuss all relevant information with you in a pre-operation discussion which lasts around one hour. Here the indication is mutually verified, the therapy goals discussed, the existing examination results discussed, and the course of therapy and the possible risks entailed elaborated. Furthermore, you have the possibility to discuss open questions with the Case Management.

Planning the therapy

On the second day, after you have had time to decide whether you wish to proceed with the therapy at the WPE, a so-called planning date session takes place. As the irradiation must be performed with millimetre accuracy – and always unerringly – the patient may not move during the irradiation. For this purpose we place specially fabricated positioning aids, such as vacuum pillows, gypsum shells or masks, depending upon the exact region to be irradiated. The fabrication and fitting take place during the planning session.

For the planning we also perform a computed tomography (planning CT) and a magnetic resonance tomography (planning MRT). The planning CT is an x-ray examination which displays the sectional images of the body. The planning MRT is also an imaging procedure, in which the sectional images are produced by a very strong magnetic field. With these exact displays of your findings, the attending doctor and the accompanying medical experts can plan and quasi-simulate the therapy on the basis of a three-dimensional “CT patient model”. The development and optimisation of this irradiation plan is very tedious and requires around two weeks’ time. Thereafter, the therapy itself can begin immediately. We then inform you of the dates in advance.