High-quality health information

“I understand what you’re saying… I just can’t remember it when I get home.”

In stressful situations, and clinical encounters are often stressful for patients, even the most attentive will miss some key information. Since modern medical practice is increasingly a partnership between clinician and patient, discussion and understanding are crucial. High-quality consumer health resources, both in print and online, help busy clinicians and patients stay on the same page. 

The library section of the College website (www.cpsbc.ca) provides a suggested list under “Patient Information,” including local organizations like HealthLinkBC and Vancouver Coastal Health. These sites have extensive collections of topics, and not only do they give a local perspective, they come in a number of languages. 

Another free, authoritative, multi-language site, supported by the US National Institutes of Health, is MedlinePlus. This site includes information on drugs, alternative medicine, and many other topics; tutorials; and links to other reliable sources. 

For patient leaflets and handouts, phy­sicians may go to the American Aca­demy of Family Physicians’ FamilyDoctor.org website or log in to MD Con­sult or AccessMedicine. MD Consult has the added benefit of allowing clinicians to customize pamphlets to include the physician’s name, address, and additional patient instructions.

Your patients may prefer to do their own Internet searching for health information. To help them evaluate the quality of a site, a useful guide is to look for the Health on the Net symbol on the site’s home page. This symbol indicates that the site follows the quality-control guidelines developed by the HON Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization founded to ensure ethical standards for on­line medical information. HON certification is another way to differentiate between good quality sites and those with strictly commercial motives.
—Karen MacDonell
—Robert Melrose
—Judy Neill
Library Co-managers

This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.