Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented dire challenges and impacted every sector of Africa’s socioeconomic and health space. Medical physics activities have not been spared either. Medical physicists are highly specialized professionals who play essential roles in healthcare by serving as a bridge between patients and technology. They undertake radiation protection and safety, dose optimization, equipment calibration, dosimetry and treatment planning to ensure safe and quality service delivery in radiation medicine. A survey conducted in Africa to assess the pandemic’s impact on medical physics activities and immediate measures to deal with the situation revealed that most radiotherapy centres were forced to adjust workflows and reschedule patient’s treatments. Measures instituted in radiotherapy included introduction of shift schedules, working from home through virtual platforms and switching treatment courses to hypo-fractionation techniques. Many centres lacked dedicated radiotherapy equipment for COVID-19 patients and infrastructure for remote network access to support clinical care. Although innovative ways were adopted to manage the effects, COVID-19 pandemic has exposed critical systemic weaknesses and lessons learnt have called for urgent actions by principal actors in government and the health sector. Recommendations for recovery from the pandemic include boosting domestic capacities through intra-African and south-south cooperation; building urgent clinical infrastructure including radiation medicine capacity; promoting collaboration between African scientists, universities and local manufacturers to innovate and build critical medical equipment like ventilators and 3D printed face visors; creating platforms to scale up collaborative research and training in medical physics and other areas; and revamping expenditure on health systems by African governments.