Judge Health

The copyright of this site is held by Contact a Family and the Information Society Research and Consultancy Group, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. You can copy and reproduce these guidelines without asking permission, as long as you credit us as the author and publisher. When you credit us as the …

Time spent searching is not wasted. This is how you develop your critical skills and identify sites you can trust. The process of looking for information is important. It helps many people adjust to their condition. There are stages to a condition. Different types of information may be needed at these different stages. Before a …

Unless your search is very simple, always use the ‘advanced search’ option provided by the search engine. This is normally a link near to the search box on the home page. ‘Advanced search’ allows you to do things like: Find results with all of the words you type in your query. This makes it much …

Try a health gateway first. These provide free access to a catalogue of health and medical Internet sites. You can look for information under subject sections, or search the gateway using keywords. Some examples of health gateways are listed below. NHS Direct Online (http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk [Opens new browser window] NHS Direct Online is produced by the NHS. …

Use search engines if you cannot find what you want from the gateways. These give you lists of a large number of sites. However these sites have not been checked for quality as search engines index the Web automatically. Even if a site is high up in the list of search results it may not …

This section lists the things to look for that will help you judge if a Web site is of good quality. The contents of this section are listed below. Quality and usefulness are not the same thing. A site may be of good quality but not contain any information that is useful to you at …

You may see a kitemark on a site. Kitemarks are signs or logos indicating that the Web site has been ‘endorsed’ in some way by another organisation. Kitemarks can mean many different things. They do not necessarily mean that the health information is correct. A kitemark could just mean that in someone’s view the site …

The information on this Web site was written by an information professional, based on the views of health consumers and support groups. It does not contain medical information and we cannot answer medical questions. If you have a medical question please contact your doctor. Although obtaining information from the Internet can be very helpful, it …