Article type
Year
Abstract
Introduction/Objective: To improve the ability of helplines and other public information services to communicate information about treatment choices and clinical effectiveness to consumers.
Methods: An initial study was funded by the King's Fund Centre in 1994-6. Questionnaires were sent to 73 consumer health information services to assess the frequency of enquiries about treatment choices and the information resources which information services said they used to answer these enquiries. Then enquiries to these service were monitored over a 6 week period to assess the quality of information resources actually used. A follow up study and a new national resource centre both commenced in 1997.
Results: Over the 6 week monitoring period 18% of enquiries received by consumer health information services related to treatment choices. The information services showed a good theoretical awareness of evidence based information sources but in practice there was very low use of these sources. Most worryingly 28% of treatment enquiries were answered verbally only. Following this study the King's Fund funded a series of training and other development projects on treatment outcomes for consumer health information services. The Help for Health Trust has now received a further grant from the NHS R & D Programme to assess whether the increased availability of training and some evidence based information designed for consumers has improved the ability of consumer health information services to answer treatment choice enquiries.
Discussion: There has been some progress in developing skills and resources to support effective communication with consumers. The importance of this area of work has now been recognised with the award of an NHS contract to The Help for Health Trust to set up a national resource centre for quality and evidence in information for consumers. The new centre, operational from April 1997, will be developing quality tools for appraisal of treatment information for consumers and a national collection of evidence based materials in a variety of formats.
Methods: An initial study was funded by the King's Fund Centre in 1994-6. Questionnaires were sent to 73 consumer health information services to assess the frequency of enquiries about treatment choices and the information resources which information services said they used to answer these enquiries. Then enquiries to these service were monitored over a 6 week period to assess the quality of information resources actually used. A follow up study and a new national resource centre both commenced in 1997.
Results: Over the 6 week monitoring period 18% of enquiries received by consumer health information services related to treatment choices. The information services showed a good theoretical awareness of evidence based information sources but in practice there was very low use of these sources. Most worryingly 28% of treatment enquiries were answered verbally only. Following this study the King's Fund funded a series of training and other development projects on treatment outcomes for consumer health information services. The Help for Health Trust has now received a further grant from the NHS R & D Programme to assess whether the increased availability of training and some evidence based information designed for consumers has improved the ability of consumer health information services to answer treatment choice enquiries.
Discussion: There has been some progress in developing skills and resources to support effective communication with consumers. The importance of this area of work has now been recognised with the award of an NHS contract to The Help for Health Trust to set up a national resource centre for quality and evidence in information for consumers. The new centre, operational from April 1997, will be developing quality tools for appraisal of treatment information for consumers and a national collection of evidence based materials in a variety of formats.