Sharing our unique and specialised medical physics knowledge
21 March 2024
A new grant will allow medical physicists from regional areas around Australia to learn first-hand from experts at Peter Mac.
Professor Tomas Kron OAM is a medical physicist at Peter Mac with a passion for education and training who can now share his knowledge and the incredible radiation facilities at Peter Mac with a broader range of trainees.
The federal government provided funding to the Australian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine to support colleagues in regional areas expand their training capabilities and motivate them to remain or consider working in regional areas.
Professor Kron received the competitive funding with his proposal to facilitate medical physicists’ trainee and registrar exchanges between Peter Mac and regional radiotherapy centres.
“The grant will take medical physicists in training at hospitals around Australia and place them into Peter Mac for two weeks,” said Professor Kron, Director of Physical Sciences.
“There are thirty medical physicists at Peter Mac who work with radiation and imaging to ensure patient safety and to optimise the use of expensive pieces of equipment. “Coupled with safety our role is to also ensure the radiation equipment is fit for the purpose required and will deliver the desired amount of radiation to the right area, or if we think of imaging that the equipment can provide the image that the radiographer and radiologist require to make an accurate assessment.”
Professor Kron said he is hoping the exchange program will encourage and enable medical physicists in regional Australia learn about novel techniques, provide high-quality services as well as some of the highly technical services that medical physics affords.
“When I started as a medical physicist there was no specific training, however the role of the medical physicist is now well established,” Professor Kron said.
He explained that there is now an excellent training and certification program for new medical physicists in Australia and New Zealand that he was fortunate to have helped develop.
“The variety of procedures we do at Peter Mac is much greater than many regional centres with a lot of specialised procedures like treating children and total body irradiation, so we receive patients from many parts of Australia at times,” Professor Kron said.
“A person who does their training in a regional centre does not have the ability to observe or learn about these specialised techniques and the training programs indicate that people need to know they exist and how they operate.”
On the flip side Peter Mac registrars work in a highly technical and demanding environment and an exchange to a regional area will provide them with the opportunity to spend two weeks in a different environment where they are much more involved with patient care.
“This very much a two way process whereby we aim to all learn from each other,” notes Professor Kron.
The program aims to have four exchanges a year between Peter Mac and a regional radiotherapy centre over the course of two years with the first exchange hopefully occurring in August 2024.