Oxford Brookes UniversityInternet sites for Health and Social Care
If you are unfamiliar with searching the Internet, or want to search more effectively, the Library has pages available to help you and point you to more information. You may also want to take a look at the Virtual Training Suite's Internet for Nursing tutorial (useful for midwives and health visitors too!) or Allied Health tutorial (OTs, physios and other professions).
Key Health and Social Care sites
- Department of Health - includes DoH publications and statistics, as well as information on public health, social care and research.
- DirectGov includes useful contacts, information on local councils and public consultations.
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation - includes access to reports, press releases, topical issues in the areas of housing, social care and social policy, and links to other useful sites.
- National Health Service (in England) - including the NHS Plan, White and Green Papers, National Service Frameworks, and NHS Careers.
- NHS Evidence (formerly National Library for Health)- a vast and ever-growing range of resources for NHS professionals and health and social care students.
- World Health Organization - includes the WHO Library, which provides some full-text documents in its database.
The Internet is vast, containing a great deal of useful information. However, because anyone can put information there, it can also contain unreliable information - learn how to evaluate what you find!
Just browsing ("surfing") can be interesting but time consuming. The following gateways and listings will help you find quality resources in health:
- Better Health - collection of free to view evidence based papers, resources and weblinks.
- BUBL Link - medicine, health and social welfare
- Nurse Prescriber - peer-reviewed, free online educational service and information resource devoted to nurse prescribers and healthcare professional in related fields
- Patient UK - directory of UK health and illness websites, compiled by two general practitioners from Newcastle-upon-Tyne
- SUMSearch - evidence based practice on the Internet, with an American bias, produced by the University of Texas Health Science Center
Look at one of these sources for more information on evaluating what you find:
- Brookes Library's own guide to Evaluating Web Sources
- Health on the Net Foundation Code of Conduct - for medical and health websites, sites which abide by the principles of this code can display a Health on the Net "seal"
- QUICK: the Quality Information Checklist - produced by the Health Education Authority and the Centre for Health Information Quality
If you still need further help, you can email: healthcarelibrarians@brookes.ac.uk