Introduction:
According to a report elaborated by the World Health Organization, now exists approximately 10,000 health web pages ( WHO 2000). The health information available in the internet, is getting more extensive everyday, which makes it necessary to evaluate the quality of this information according to certain criteria.
Objective:
To localize the most important resources about occupational medicine, available in the internet and evaluate the quality of the web sites with a valid system.
Materials and Methods
This is a transverse descriptive study, in which the subjects of the study are web pages about occupational medicine.
The institutions, centres and web sites related to occupational medicine are identified through different types of search sites ( Diario Medico search site, All the Web, Yahoo Salud and Health Web), using key words such as : “occupational medicine “, “medecine du travail”, “medicina del trabajo” “occupational diseases”, “maladies professionnelles” and “enfermedades profesionales”.
The quality of the information available in the web pages of the centres related to occupational medicine will be evaluated using a questionnaire in which was taken into account the revision of evaluation criteria of web pages related to health, published by the European Commision.
According to the points obtained in the questionnaire, the quality of the information in the different web pages will be determined. The value 1 will be considered as the maximum value or as a 100% percentage. The web pages in which the information does not appear in spanish, english or french will not be evaluated.
Results
Till now, 12 web pages of several publics institutions were localized which fulfil the search conditions and 3 of this have obtained more of 0,50 points in the questionnaire. We will present these pages which have obtained the highest points in the quessionare.
Conclusions
This information, evaluated according to certain quality criteria, will be hopefully converted into a tool to support investigation.
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