Through an ongoing, interregional technical cooperation (TC) project, a new group of students are given the opportunity, every two years, to become TC Fellows and to enroll in the Master’s Programme in Medical Physics (MPMP) at both the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the Trieste University during 2015-2018. The MPMP consists of a year-long training at ICTP and the Trieste University, and a second year of full-time clinical training in a hospital in Italy.
The second group of Fellows—comprising 21 students—was officially welcomed to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics during an inaugural ceremony which took place on the ICTP campus on 5th February 2016. Meanwhile, the first group of students, composed of six Fellows who had already completed their first year curriculum at ICTP, has begun their clinical training experience in hospitals around Italy on 1st January 2016.
The new Fellows are from IAEA Member States which lack adequate post-graduate education programmes in Medical Physics, particularly low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean, and Eastern Europe regions. In many countries, especially in LMICs, both the initial stages of academic education and the subsequent competency-based clinical training are missing, and it is unrealistic to expect that comprehensive medical physics training programmes could be developed in these countries in the near future without the support of the IAEA or other international stakeholders. The lack of qualified trainers, and of a critical mass of students, is usually the principle obstacle to establishing such a programme. As ICTP is well-known for its rich experience in training and research in the area of medical physics, the establishment of an international medical physics education programme at ICTP—endorsed and supported by the IAEA—was considered an effective means of responding to the increasing needs for training in this field.
The MPMP in ICTP is prepared with the assistance of the IAEA and is based on the IAEA Training Course Series No. 56, Postgraduate Medical Physics Academic Programmes. The clinical training is conducted in selected Italian hospitals who have agreed, in principle, to follow the IAEA clinical training guides in medical physics (TCS-37 for radiation oncology physics, TCS-47 for radiology physics and TCS-50 for nuclear medicine physics).
