Feature

A prescription for better informed patients

India’s first health education resource centre has opened in Bombay. Its founder, Aniruddha Malpani, explains what’s on offer

The Health Education Library for People (HELP), India’s first consumer health education resource centre, was set up in Bombay to provide people with the information they need to promote health and prevent and treat medical problems in partnership with doctors.

We are a public library so everyone is welcome. We have just opened our doors to the public and get 5-10 users a day. We charge a nominal amount of 5 Rupees (10 pence) only a visit, and we offer membership to companies for Rs 7,500 a year. Hopefully, companies will take advantage of our services, so that their employees can use our information to take better care of their health. We do not lend materials, but have a photocopier in the library.

We have access to information on every health and medical topic under the sun—explained in terms which the lay person can understand. At present all our materials are in English and we plan to translate educational materials in regional languages.

There are air-conditioned reading rooms seating 20-25 persons; an up-to-date collection of over 5,000 consumer health books, 10,000 pamphlets, and many magazines and newsletters; audio visual educational media, including over 100 video tapes; computer software , including CD-ROMs; and photocopying facilities, at Rs 1 a page.

Information on the latest medical research from all over the world can be obtained through an Internet connection. These searches cost Rs 100 per query, for a half-hour search. In fact, we have pioneered online searching of the Medline database for the first time in India, in collaboration with PaperChase, a non-profit service of the Beth Israel Hospital of Harvard University in the US.

The classification scheme we use is the ‘Planetree Classification Scheme’ developed by the Planetree health centre in California, which is specifically designed for consumer health education.

The library catalogue is computerised, using the user-friendly SLIM package. Our online public access catalogue is now available on the Internet at http://www.allindia.com/helplib (the India on Internet site), so that readers can ‘browse’ through our catalogue from home. This allows us to extend our outreach services, providing consumer health information to Internet users from all over the world.

For those unable to come personally to the library, we answer questions by post or email, for which we charge Rs 200 a query. We also hope to be able to answer telephone queries in the future. We are open Monday to Saturday, from 10am to 6pm.

We are asking doctors to refer their patients to us and hope they will use our services increasingly, so we can help them to educate their patients. We will distribute prescription pads which say Rx knowledge: refer to HELP!to remind doctors about our services.

Funding is still a major problem, and so far we have borne all the expenses personally. The running expenses are about Rs 10 lakhs (£20,000) a year, and we are hoping to get grants from companies to be able to meet this. We are unlikely to be self-sufficient, since we have priced our services low to make them affordable for the average citizen, and are a registered non-profit charitable trust.

Most people have been very happy with the service we provide. But since this is a new concept, we think it will be some time before the idea catches on.

Our goals are:

• to create and provide access to a reliable and up-to-date collection of consumer health materials, so that people can become better informed about health. We believe that the best prescription is knowledge;
• to encourage a healthy doctor-patient relationship, since the best patient is a well-informed one;
• to provide resources which doctors can adapt to their own practice, to use for educating their patients;
• to be a useful resource for writers and journalists and so improve the quality and accuracy of reporting for medical topics in the lay press;
• to act as a stimulus for patients with a particular disease to get together and form self-help support groups;
• to prevent health fraud and quackery by educating the consumer about health and illness;

Ultimately, we hope that well informed patients will demand the best treatment available internationally—and that this will act as an incentive for doctors to update their skills, and for hospitals to improve their facilities.