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Untangling the Web

First of all, these are my credentials: I am a librarian in a UK general hospital, with no special knowledge of oncology. That much will become clear when I tackle cancer sites. I find that I spend a lot less time acting as an intermediary between clinicians and MEDLINE, and much more helping them to find other things on the Web that they could not find for themselves. My boss spotted this trend and asked me to do a slot in our weekly ‘Grand round’ called ‘Website of the week’. The Editor of this journal came upon me there, praising the virtues of http://www.embarrassing problems.co.uk (try ‘genital warts’ for an oncology angle). My UK base inevitably means that I am not as well informed on other countries’ resources as I am on the UK’s, so send me an e-mail at david.johnson@ ldh-tr.anglox.nhs.uk if you feel I am becoming overinsular, and/or you would like to share something with me. Let me begin with a newcomer among health gateway sites (new as I write in March 2001, anyway). The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has a patchy record of providing knowledge to its staff to aid decision making. All right, that’s a euphemism – it has almost no record of doing so. A new information technology strategy called ‘Information for health’ has provided both the impetus and the funding to make good this gap. The result is the National Electronic Library for Health (NELH) http://www.nelh.nhs.uk. Its project director is Dr J. A. Muir Gray, one of the leading proponents of evidence-based health-care in the UK. He has long been concerned with the need for clinicians to have ready access to pre-appraised and pre-packaged knowledge at the time of decision making, preferably something that can be retrieved and read in 30 seconds! So what do we find in the NELH? Partly it is a gathering together of other evidence-based sites, but it also offers NHS staff free access to two products of