Freedman, D. Jay

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) has established a comprehensive Code of Ethics for its members. The Code is a formal part of AAPM governance, maintained as Professional Policy 24, and includes both principles of ethical practice and the rules by which a complaint will be adjudicated. The structure and content of the Code have been crafted to also serve the much broader purpose of giving practical ethical guidance to AAPM members for making sound decisions in their professional lives. The Code is structured in four major parts: a Preamble, a set of ten guiding Principles, Guidelines that elucidate the application of the Principles in various practice settings, and the formal Complaint process. Guidelines have been included to address evolving social and cultural norms, such as the use of social media and the broadening scope of considerations important in an evolving workplace. The document presented here is the first major revision of the AAPM Code of Ethics since 2008. This revision was approved by the Board of Directors to become effective 1 January 2019.

Derived from 2 yr of deliberations and community engagement, Medical Physics 3.0 ( MP 3.0) is an effort commissioned by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine ( AAPM ) to devise a framework of strategies by which medical physicists can maintain and improve their integral roles in, and contributions to, health care and its innovation under conditions of rapid change and uncertainty. Toward that goal, MP 3.0 advocates a broadened and refreshed model of sustainable excellence by which medical physicists can and should contribute to health care. The overarching conviction of MP 3.0 is that every healthcare facility can benefit from medical physics and every patient's care can be improved by a medical physicist. This large and expansive challenge necessitates a range of strategies specific to each area of medical physics: clinical practice, research, product development, and education. The present paper offers a summary of the Phase 1 deliberations of the MP 3.0 initiative pertaining to strategic directions of the discipline primarily but not exclusively oriented toward the clinical practice of medical physics in the United States.