How to reload staticfiles.json without restarting Django?

I have a Django app deployed via docker image on Render and using whitenoise to manage staticfiles. The site has a page that renders a user_manual.html and embedded images in an iframe within my page/navbar structure. This generally works fine.

Now the issue: I have an admin page that allow site admins to upload a new user manual as a MS Word .docx file to my media dir. The upload process does these things:

The above works fine. I can see the updated entry for user_manual.html in staticfiles.json and the new user_manual..html in the staticfiles dir. The new file is served when django restarts.

But, I want the new file to be served immediately and it is not. The browser console shows: Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 () and browser shows: Not Found The requested resource was not found on this server

If I restart the server, then the new user_manual.html is rendered. I infer that staticfiles.json is cached by either Django or whitenoise and the cache is not rebuilt when collectstatic is run.

Any suggestions on how can I get the new user manual.html to render without restarting the server?

(Separately, I attempted a couple of times to render this as an html string from the media folder, bypassing Django’s static file mechanism, but there were too many issues/complexities with css and images, etc.)

Many thanks in advance, Charlie