New online medical resource

Just five years ago if you were diagnosed with an illness, you would have a consultation with a doctor and maybe a nurse, probably be given some leaflets and a phone number, and be told to come back in a few weeks or months. In serious cases, your next appointment might be for a major operation or, say, chemotherapy, and the intervening, uncertain few weeks could be pretty scary. The web, however, has changed all that.

Now, health care is one of the internet’s most popular areas: pregnancy groups, cancer support forums or information about prescription drugs have become vital aspects of many patients’ ways of coping with these conditions, happy or sad. That’s where a new site, healthtalkonline.org, fits in: funded by a charity based at Oxford University called DIPex, it has steadily been collating an archive of interviews with real people, filmed, recorded or written, on topics that currently range from autism to arthritis, from 10 different types of cancers to information about screening, and from pregnancy to caring for those with dementia.

There are, in fact, lots of similar sites focused on specific illnesses, and indeed many of those have been instrumental in campaigning for changes in the NHS’s policies on which drugs are deemed to offer sufficient value for money to merit prescription. But the researchbased approach of healthtalkonline makes it rather different.

It costs about £120,000 for a researcher to carry out all the interviews to document each condition properly, and the aim is to do enough, usually between 30 and 50 interviews, to cover most aspects of the topic concerned. That means that when, say, a parent of a child with autism logs on, there’s a genuine wealth of information on the condition, on how to look after sufferers, but also a guarantee that this information is accurate. User-generated sites, while useful, have none of healthtalkonline’s authority.

Source: Telegraph