12th Workshop on Accelerator Operations

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, shutdown due to an increase in the number of infected patients among accelerator operators was a concern that needed to be considered, and measures needed to be taken to ensure the safety of accelerator operators and to preserve operational performance.
In HIMAC, the accelerator operators were divided into two groups and isolated from each other in order to prevent the spread of infection among the accelerator operators and to ensure the continuity of therapeutic beam supply. The members of the group were fixed and rotated weekly into two groups, one for accelerator operation and the other for backup. The accelerator operation group was shifted from two 12-hour shifts to three 8-hour shifts, and the backup group was basically teleworked to minimize the number of people staying in the control room as much as possible. Except for handover during shifts, contact between shifts was kept to a minimum, and opportunities for contact between each operator were reduced as much as possible. In addition, we have improved the effectiveness of infection prevention measures by assigning personnel so that multiple people do not gather in the same place during breaks involving eating and drinking, which increases the risk of infection.
These innovations should have contributed to the prevention of the spread of infection among operators, but at the same time, they had no small impact on operation and maintenance. How them change affect our operations and what we learned for future work will be reported.