The New England Clinicians Forum seeks to address the special needs of clinical service providers, especially those involved with medically underserved populations. It recognizes that access to information, to practice tools and to each other is an important way to support the work of these clinicians and that the internet represents a unique and powerful means of accomplishing this. Many efforts have been made in the past to reach line clinicians, but making and maintaining such contacts has met with limited success at best.

We understand that our goal here, to reach across many disciplines practicing in many settings, is especially ambitious. We also understand that the mere existence of a website, while necessary, is not sufficient. This is not the “Field of Dreams” where we simply build it and then expect clinicians to come. We must create a network that not only invites, but expects, clinicians to reach out to one another. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, the message is, “Ask not what a clinician website can do for you, but what you can do for a clinician website.” Like the folktale “Stone Soup”, when everyone contributes what they can to a website for clinicians, the result is something far more nourishing than anything any of us could possibly produce on our own.

So our invitation and our challenge to you is to JOIN US and the first demonstration of your interest is to not simply register but to leave us with something. It can be a question, it can be feedback about the website, it can be a good link you think we should know about, it could be material you would like to see posted or it could be a resource you would like to share. Or it could be anything else, because there is so much we all need and you know better than anyone what things clinicians lack and what things have been especially useful to have. You will be joining people like yourself who provide direct services to patients who are interested in coming together to find ways to improve the delivery of patient care while making the delivery easier and more satisfying.