Madan Rehani, PhD
President IOMP
madan.rehani@gmail.com 

Are we reaching out to people we serve? Are we listening to them? In this P-message, I want to deliberate on these issues.

The normal practice for most international organizations is to send information to their national counterparts and assume that the information is percolating down to grass-roots. Not many countries have established mechanisms of doing so. We studied this and realized that AAPM has the best mechanism in place for communicating information down to its membership. Several large countries do not. We thus are taking steps to ensure that the information from IOMP is reaching out to grassroots in all countries. This is a continuous process, but we are monitoring it actively. We encourage all recipients of this newsletter to pass on links of the newsletter to their colleagues and friends and ask them to subscribe. In the last issue, we were appalled by the highest number of forwarding of the newsletter by an individual of over 700. Listserves like Medphys and Dximagmedphys are other important source and they do a splendid job. Please feel free to let us know of other listserves and you may better add them in the subscription. We are far away currently in reaching out to over 26,000 memberships that we are supposed to oversee and serve.

Study of what links in the newsletter or on the IOMP website are receiving more views or downloads provides interesting findings. Utility over information seems to be driving force. Free downloads of publications and travel assistance links received the highest hits. Accordingly, our intention is to provide contents that people like rather than what we like. We will continuously monitor visit and download statistics with an intent to avoid information pollution and enhance utility.

Since major part of the medical physics community globally is radiation oncology physicists, we intend to cover their need with time adequately.