Medical physics education and training: Regional and international challenges

Due to recent fast technical developments and the ever increasing demands for better health services and living standards, increasing demands are witnessed for a larger number of better qualified medical physicists. Pressures are mounting on educational institutes to come up with the appropriate balance among background teaching material, skills, and practical training. The widening spectrum of new teaching courses possible for addition to the university curriculum presents a non-trivial program structure problem. In addition to more financial and hardware demands, it requires careful tailoring of the educational process (teaching material and skills, timing and delivery methods, program structure) according to the particular goals of the program and the professional needs of the geographic location. We highlight some of the difficulties experienced locally in both medical physics (MP) education and profession and compare them with various regions of the globe. Finally, we propose some suggestions to alleviate them. In particular we emphasize the importance of acquiring programming skills at an early stage of the educational process. This is so not only because it is a skill, but also because it can be developed into a teaching tool itself through the solving of many MP problems by modeling and simulation.