Judge - Web sites for health

The Judge Project developed guidelines for judging the quality of health information Web sites. Two sets of guidelines were produced: (i) to help health consumers make informed choices about Web sites, and (ii) to assist support groups to produce good quality Web sites. These guidelines were made freely available as a purpose-designed Web site from February 2003 to February 2009. The content of this web site are available for download here as Word or PDF documents (see bottom of this page).

The Judge Project was developed in partnership between Sue Childs at the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University and Diane Barnett at Contact a Family (http://www.cafamily.org.uk). The project was supported by the Health Foundation. The project ran from 2002 to 2003.

A Steering Group advised the project. Its members were from: The Alzheimer's Society, The Centre for Health information Quality (now closed), The National electronic Library for Health (now NHS Evidence Health Information Resources), The National Information Forum, Organising Medical Networked Information (now Intute: Medicine including dentistry) and Patient UK.

The guidelines are based on the views of health consumers and support groups. The research was carried out by Sue Childs. It consisted of six stages.

1. Collecting background information, by a review of the literature on quality issues and health information on the Internet.

2. Obtaining health consumers' views on quality issues and concerns about health information on the Internet and any help they needed, by (i) a postal questionnaire survey of health consumers and (ii) focus groups with health consumers and support group members and workers.

3. Writing the guidelines, by using the information gained from the first two stages.

4. Piloting the guidelines, by making them available as a basic Web site: individual health consumers and support group workers then used the guidelines with the researcher and fedback their views.

5. Developing a Web site to disseminate the guidelines, by designing a simple, accessible, usable Web site, testing the site against a wide range of accessibility guidelines and setting up a free-access site with its own domain name.

6. Publicising the Web site, by sending details to a wide range of organisations, officially launching the guidelines with press releases and submitting the Web site to search engines and gateways.

The project has resulted in a number of published journal articles:

Childs S (2005). Judging the quality of Internet-based health information. Performance Measurement and Metrics, 6(2):80-96

Childs S (2004). Developing health web site quality assessment guidelines for the voluntary sector: Outcomes from the Judge project. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 21(Suppl 2):14-26