Communities of Interest opened up to non-IPEM members

AS part of the response to the Covid-19 crisis, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine has opened up one of its communication channels to non-members.

The Communities of Interest (CoI) are specialist forums for healthcare scientists working in everything from clinical engineering to nuclear medicine, aspiring Medical Physics Experts to those working in rehabilitation engineering, magnetic resonance imaging or ultrasound.

Professor Stephen O’Connor, IPEM’s President, said: ‘We want to use the CoIs as a way for healthcare scientists to share best practice in their particular area and to be able to provide professional, expert advice on dealing with the Covid-19 crisis to those that need it.

‘To help share this as far as possible, we are opening up the communities to non-IPEM members. We feel this is an important step in sharing the expert knowledge our members have with colleagues who they might work alongside but who are not IPEM members.

‘One member has, for example, produced some extremely useful material on clinical engineering, which has been shared with almost 400 members of that particular CoI.

‘We have seen a huge increase in the amount of conversations taking place on them and already, after only a couple of days of being extended, we have several non-IPEM members who have asked to join the CoIs.’

In order for non-members to join, they need to simply email office@ipem.ac.uk with their details and they can then be added to the communities they are interested in.

As a reminder to members, in order to login to the CoI you need to do the following:

• To join the communities, or change your settings about frequency of contact, login to the CoI website: https://my.community.ipem.ac.uk/login . Once this is set up, if you opt to receive an email update in real time, you are able to reply directly to the email, exactly as on other mailbase platforms.
• You don’t need to login to see discussions or post a comment, you can have posts emailed to you from any CoI you join, either in real time, or as daily or weekly digests, or you can choose to have none. You can reply directly from your email, including with attachments, so you don’t need to login to participate.
• Experience at the testing stage has shown there can be problems getting in using Internet Explorer (this is common to many platforms), so we recommend using Chrome, Firefox or a different browser. 

Professor O’Connor added: ‘To all our members I would say please do ask your colleagues to join, not only can they share in your best practice but they will bring their own thoughts and ideas too.'