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Six recommended Web sites from your colleagues
Many patient education managers looking for guidance on program development and management techniques or educational materials for patients turn to the World Wide Web. Therefore, we asked experts what their favorite patient education-related Web sites were. Here are the answers we received:
• Cezanne Garcia, MPH, CHES, manager, patient and family education services, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle:
"It is very difficult to select just one site, because different sites serve and meet different needs based upon a day’s work," says Garcia. Web sites she finds helpful include:
http://www.discern.org.uk/ — DISCERN is an instrument that has been designed to help users of consumer health information judge the quality of written information about treatment choices. Some of the information available on treatment choices is poor quality, and only a small proportion of it is based on good evidence, explains Garcia. Many information sources provide inaccurate or confusing advice, and it may be hard to know which information to use and which to discard. This Web site helps you be more discerning, she says.
http://www.updateusa.com/clibip/clib.htm — Cochrane Review Methodology Database is a bibliography of articles on the science of research synthesis. Several databases are included in The Cochrane Library. One of them, The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, contains Cochrane reviews; another, The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, is a bibliographic database of controlled trials.
http://uncweb.carl.org/reveal/ — UnCover Reveal is an automated current awareness service that delivers the table of contents of your favorite journals directly to your e-mail box. "With Reveal, you can also create search strategies for your favorite topics. Keyword or author searches result in a list of individual article citations," says Garcia. Articles may be ordered from UnCover by reply e-mail, or you can print the list and fax the order to UnCover.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ — PubMed is a project developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health. PubMed was developed in conjunction with publishers of biomedical literature as a search tool for accessing literature citations and linking to full-text journals at Web sites of participating publishers.
• Joan Greathouse, MEd, president, Joan Greathouse Consulting Co., Seattle:
http://fergusonreport.com — This Web site is the Newsletter of Consumer Health Informatics and Online Health, written by Tom Ferguson, who was an early proponent of accurate, credible on-line health information, says Greathouse. "I have been developing trainings on self-care and consumer empowerment, and on-line health information is an important piece of the equation," Greathouse says. "The on-line newsletter keeps me up to date on issues of using the Web as a tool to gather health and self-care information and on the effects of consumers and health care providers using the Web for health information," she explains.
Greathouse likes the site because the information is credible and the articles are timely and informative. The newsletter is free, and those who subscribe receive e-mail messages about other sources of information on on-line health.
• Fran London, MS, RN, health education specialist, Phoenix (AZ) Children’s Hospital:
http://www.profusion.com — "I have not found one patient education Web site that has it all," London notes. "However, one site I use is the ProFusion metasearch engine. It uses many search engines to get results, and there is a health-related subset of choices that helps hone down its findings." Some of the materials on the site may not be written for lay readers, but you can get specific material in a hurry, she says. On the left of the ProFusion screen is a list titled "On Target" with "health" listed as one choice. Click on "health" to arrive at a new search screen that offers several health and medical search engines.
[Editor’s note: From time to time, Patient Education Management will print a list of the favorite patient education-related Web sites of patient education professionals. If you have a favorite Web site, please contact Susan Cort Johnson, Editor, at (916) 362-0133 or via e-mail at [email protected]. Tell us how you use the site in your work and why you like the site. Be sure to include the Web address for the site.]
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