Radiation oncology physics coverage during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Successes and lessons learned

Enterprise services include brachytherapy, external beam therapy, adaptive radiation therapy, quality assurance (QA), proton therapy, treatment planning, stereotactic body radiotherapy, (SBRT), stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), and satellite operations covered by a team of nearly 40 physicists. Immediate actions After the first reports of COVID‐19 in the United States, it became clear that our traditional staffing structure had inherent risk and needed modification to minimize interaction and transmission of any infection among staff. To ensure effective communication and coordination of duties under the “pod” and remote work model, a standing 7 am daily COVID‐19 remote huddle was established on March 16, 2020 between the different leaders of the department consisting of the radiation oncology department chair, radiation oncology clinical director, hospital director of radiation oncology, medical physics director, chief of clinical medical physics, department director of business operations, and director of business affairs. Areas where we historically thought only on‐site support could occur can now be supported remotely as well as onsite. 1,2 For instance, one Gamma Knife physicist is on site per our NRC requirements but we can also have a second physicist logged in via remote network keyboard video mouse (IP‐KVM) access and communicating via video conference to provide additional coverage that, pre‐pandemic, would have been on‐site only.