Innovative ideas needed for timely and effective public health information dissemination
- Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada, AL no 6701A, 120 Colonnade Road, Ottawa,Ontario K1A 1B4, Canada; Department of Public Health Sciences,University of Toronto; and Department of Epidemiology and CommunityMedicine, University of Ottawa, Canada;Bernard_Choi@phac-aspc.gc.ca
Scientific findings must be published in accessible formats for the public to use. One common practice is to put information on line. However, web based information may be neither timely nor effective. There are information users who do not have access to the internet. Even among those with internet access, it may be difficult to reach a specific piece of information on a specific web site. For example, a Google search on the internet using the key words “health + information” brought 103 000 000 web sites.1 If a person spends on average only one minute on each web site, it will takes 588 years to go through all existing web sites assuming an eight hour workday, 365 days a year.
Innovative ideas are therefore needed for timely and effective information …
