Radiation Oncology is made up of three unique medical specialties that focus on the treatment of cancer patients with radiation therapy (also known as radiotherapy); namely radiation oncologists, radiation therapists and radiation oncology medical physicists.

Radiation therapy can be used to treat almost all cancers anywhere in the body and over half of new cancer patients require radiation therapy. Most people in Australia who have radiation therapy are treated with high energy X-rays produced by a large machine called a linear accelerator (linac).