Back to TopOur Quality Care

Patients needs to feel safe and know they are receiving excellent care and expertise when undergoing any medical procedure.

We were complimented by the California Department of Health Services for our safety and high level of competence in performing our specialty. This is a reflection of our rigorous quality management and quality assurance program:

Fig 1: Commending Letter to CET from California Department of Health Service September 2003

Back to TopOur Experience

Our experience is evidenced by the number of implants we have performed. The Nucletron Corporation, which manufactures HDR equipment , acknowledged and congratulated CET as the cancer center which performed the most HDR implants and delivered the highest number of HDR treatments in the U.S.

Dr. Demanes is extremely experienced in using HDR brachytherapy to treat a wide variety of cancers and is regarded as one of the leading HDR implant specialists. It is important that a physician be Board Certified in his/her speciality. Dr. Demanes is Board Certified in three areas; radiation oncology, medical oncology, and internal medicine.

Our clinical staff, including nurses, therapists and dosimetrists, are also HDR specialists.

Our nurses are familiar with and anticipate the needs of HDR patients during the HDR procedure. Afterwards, the nurse continues offering care, advising the patient on post-implant issues, facilitating the filling of prescriptions, and addressing any other concerns our patients may have.

HDR demands a high level of attention and careful adherence to procedure. Our radiation therapists are some of the most experienced in the country, having delivered over 17,000 HDR treatments safely. All are registered in Radiation Therapy by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists, and also have California State certifications. They are experts at evaluating the implants, obtaining accurate CTs and radiographs necessary for treatment planning and delivering the HDR treatment according to the physician's prescription. Because of their experience, they also devise ingenious solutions on how to approach difficult implants and assist in the design of special applicators.

Our dosimetrists are all certified by the Medical Dosimetrist Certification Board. They have many years of external beam and both low dose rate and HDR brachytherapy dosimetry experience.

Back to TopOur Patient Follow-Up

We insist on thorough patient follow-up, which allows us to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of our treatments. We now have mature 10 year clinical data on our patients and have begun to write papers for publication. We are not only interested in the survival rates, but also the side effects and quality of life of our patients after our treatment. We recently updated our custom database to allow for more data fields to be entered and decrease the time it takes to analyze the data. Our database is now serviced by a full time IT professional and a full time data entry assistant to keep it current, reflecting CET's commitment to following our patients and determining treatment efficacy.