Four pharmacy students from Sydney University decided to review and evaluate some websites about Epilepsy. The purpose of this exercise was to decide if the information presented on these sites is current, reliable and accurate. We also examined the design and layout of these websites to determine how easy is it to navigate around the site. We know that patients and Health Care Professionals (HCP) access different types of information on the internet, and consequently there are different sites aimed at each of those groups.

 

Our task was for each of us to choose a website from the following list and critically evaluate it.

 

   A website about a drug(s) related to Epilepsy that is suitable for patients.

   A website about Epilepsy that is suitable for patients.

   A website about a drug(s) related to Epilepsy that is suitable for HCPs.

   A website about Epilepsy that is suitable for HCPs.

 

      The criteria we used to evaluate these websites came from the Health Summit Working Group in America. The participants in this group included representatives of the general public, as well as health-care providers, medical librarians and related information resources professionals, and website developers affiliated with numerous organizations in the health-care and information communities.

 

      We chose this criteria over many others because it is specially directed towards “Assessing the Quality of Internet Health Information” and is written by a reputable organization.

 

Click here to view the criteria http://hitiweb.mitretek.org/docs/policy.html