Author: Ghada Aldosary, Abdullah A. Alshreef, Amineh Khatib Hamad, Eenas A. Omari 👨🔬
Affiliation: Loma Linda University Medical Center, Jerusalem, KASCH- Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs, Department of Radiation Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin 🌍
Purpose:
Webinars are an effective tool for disseminating knowledge and expertise to a global audience. A medical physics webinar series was established in 2022 to provide accessible continued education among Arabic-speaking medical physicists. The purpose of this work is to share lessons learned from managing this educational platform.
Methods:
In the span of two-years, 23 speakers were invited to present on various topics in medical physics. Topics were chosen to be inclusive regarding the distribution of medical physics specialties, career stage, gender, and geographical location. Topics included clinical applications, research, and professional advancement. Sufficient time was allocated for questions and discussions at the end of each webinar. Webinars were promoted through various media. Demographics and geographical data were collected at the time of registration. A short post-session survey was circulated for feedback and to gauge interest in participant contribution to future seminars.
Results:
The number of registrants were 2017 from 45 countries. LinkedIn and WhatsApp were the most effective tools for drawing target audiences. Highly attended webinars addressed clinical applications compared with research topics. The majority of attendees were clinical medical physicists (~60%). Participant engagement increased when discussions were conducted in the Arabic language. Many non-Arabic speaking attendees also joined (such as; India, Pakistan, Latin America, Nigeria, and Romania), indicating that there is an unmet need. Most attendees highly rated the sessions and showed interest in contributing as a speaker (n=617) or moderator (n=496).
Conclusion:
There is a need for accessible, free educational webinars that encourage dialogue in participants’ native language. Although beneficial, hosting frequent webinars can be resource intensive which require a dedicated team for workload distribution and a dynamic but sustainable model. This webinar series created a global network of Arab-speaking medical physicists and identified the topics of most interest to those practicing in low to middle-income countries.