Review

Caught in the net

The Patient’s Internet Handbook
Robert Kiley and Elizabeth Graham
Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2001, £9.95

It is difficult to produce useful books about the internet because it changes so quickly. Some of the pages cited in this handbook have inevitably already been moved or altered.

A book about the internet should not really be necessary, because the whole idea is to just point and click. Those of us who spend our lives doing just that probably need reminding that the process may seem daunting to a beginner. The authors manage to deal with a lot of technical topics clearly and without jargon.

This handbook has a lot of useful tips – particularly about how to use search engines and what is available in medical databases – which are not easy to find elsewhere. The authors have also set up a website to provide information on the changes that have occurred since they wrote this text.

One of their concerns is to ensure that patients have some idea which websites they can trust, and there are repeated exhortations that we should discuss our problems with our doctor. It would be interesting to set up some trials to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of a search for medical advice on the internet with a trip to your local medical practice.

The authors publicise the finding that 80 per cent of web pages produced by medical institutions about childhood diarrhoea did not conform to best practice. And there is a very useful section on how to manage your doctor’s insecurities about the internet.

Health secretary Alan Milburn has made patient choice a central focus of his health reforms. As the handbook points out, to enable patients to make choices they need information, but this is not generally available in the UK.

Those who run the NHS websites do not seem to have paid much attention to this. Simply finding the web page of your local hospital or primary care trust – if it has one – can be very hard work, at least in England. Then, when you find it, you will be lucky to find any information that a patient would find useful. The handbook authors seem to have missed the excellent SHOW site (www.show.scot.nhs.uk), which joins up all the information about different services in Scotland by the simple expedient of providing links to all the different websites and, I suspect, writing their pages for them. It doesn’t seem too much to expect the NHS in England to manage the same feat.

I recommend this book to anyone who feels they need a book for guidance, as well as their website at www.patient-handbook.co.uk – which is, of course, a cheaper option – for those who just want a few good ideas.