Subjects such as strategic planning, extra‐disciplinary communication, and management have become crucial to medical physics clinical practice and should become an integral part of the medical physics curriculum

摘要

In addition to their clinical duties, many medical physicists find themselves in a situation where they have to do managerial work such as strategic planning and communication within a hospital or with outside agencies. Typically, these skills are obtained on-the-job or by taking extra-curricular courses. However, some believe that such strategic planning and communication and management skills are so important that courses on these topics should become an integral part of the medical physics curriculum. This is the claim debated in this month's Point/Counterpoint. Arguing for the Proposition is Carmel J. Caruana, Ph.D. Dr. Caruana has a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics and a PGCE from the University of Malta, an M.Sc. in Applied Radiation Physics from the University of Birmingham, U.K., and a Ph.D. from Charles University, Prague. He is Associate Professor and Head of the Medical Physics Department, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta. Dr. Caruana specializes in diagnostic and interventional radiology, protection from ionizing radiation and other physical agents, and legislative/professional/education and training (E&T) issues in Medical Physics. He is past Chairperson of the E&T Committee of the European Federation of Organizations for Medical Physics and main author of the “Role” and “Education & Training” chapters of the EU sponsored document “European Guidelines on the Medical Physics Expert.” He is also the main author of the leadership in Medical Physics module of the EUTEMPE-RX project entitled “Leadership in Medical Physics: Development of the profession and the challenges for the Medical Physics Expert (D&IR).” Dr. Cunha received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006. He continued his experimental particle physics research with a post-doctoral position at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York working on code development for the ATLAS detector. In 2009, he moved to the University of California San Francisco, where he is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology. His current research focus is on technological improvements for brachytherapy including dose optimization, robotics, additive manufacturing, and electromagnetic tracking. He has a strong interest in education and currently serves as the Vice Chair of the UCSF Academic Senate's Graduate Council. Dr. Cunha has served as President of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the AAPM and is active on several AAPM committees including as Chairman of the Working Group on Medical Physics Graduate Education Program Curriculum. The clinical and wider economic and societal environment within which medical physicists exercise their profession has changed radically over the last years; indeed change is unrelenting and the ground seems to be constantly shifting under our feet.1, 2 there was a time when being a good scientist was sufficient to thrive within the hospital environment; a time when good physicists were considered essential for the running and ongoing development of a quality clinical service. This is not true in general anymore; economic pressures and intra- and inter-professional turf wars now dominate many of our workplaces and have turned large hospitals into gargantuan malls selling health services. In such circumstances, the quality and safety values so dear to our profession are diluted as the profit motive dominates. For example, in diagnostic radiology reduction of population doses and the emphasis on diagnostic accuracy via high image quality tend to be looked upon as less important (read ‘an unnecessary expense’) provided they do not reach critical values detectable by patients or society at large (hence affecting profits). As we strive within this new milieu to reposition our profession, departments, and often our personal selves, ongoing formal, informal and instinctive professional, departmental and personal strategic planning via