EMERALD & EMIT – worldwide computer aided education and training packages in medical physics

This paper describes the development of two web based education and training packages EMERALD and EMIT designed to meet the training needs of professional medical physicists. The programme has been developed over a number of years by collaboration between hospitals and universities across Europe. The programme concentrates on assisting competence development in five initial areas; diagnostic radiology, nuclear medicine, magnetic resonance tomography, ultrasound and radiotherapy. Each of the topic areas includes around 50 training tasks in 5 hypertext workbooks, which are supplemented by an image database relevant to each topic. The training materials have been extensively refereed during their development and are now in use in 65 countries across the globe. Initial evaluation has shown that the material enhances the training experience and produces a more consistent output