International CAMPEP-Accredited Residency Graduates Now Board Eligible

As most medical physicists are aware, in 2002, the ABR announced its decision to require candidates for certification to have completed a CAMPEP-accredited graduate program. The date of implementation was set for 2012 to allow programs and candidates plenty of time to prepare for this change.

Shortly afterward, the AAPM recommended that the ABR also require candidates to complete a CAMPEP-accredited residency to be eligible for the Part 2 exam. The ABR expressed concerns about the availability of sufficient residencies but acknowledged the benefits of standardizing the preparation of candidates and styling medical physics training after the model set by our physician colleagues. Consequently, the decision to require a residency was announced in 2004 and made effective in 2014.

In 2015, CAMPEP accredited the first graduate program outside the U.S. and Canada, and two more international graduate programs were accredited in 2020. For several years, the ABR wrestled with the decision to admit candidates from these programs, as to do so represented a departure from our previous practice for both physicians and medical physicists. However, in 2024 the ABR announced that graduates of non-North American CAMPEP-accredited graduate programs would be admitted to the Part 1 exam.

Thanks to a recent decision by its Board of Governors, the ABR will also recognize CAMPEP-accredited medical physics residency programs, regardless of their location. This means that graduates of CAMPEP-accredited residency programs will be considered board eligible, regardless of the country in which the program is located.

These decisions demonstrate the ABR’s continuing reliance on CAMPEP to evaluate and monitor the performance of educational programs in medical physics, and they remove some of the barriers to ABR certification for internationally trained candidates.