A portal to relevant and reliable information

Published research shows that cancer information on the Internet is often hard to find, is developed in an uncoordinated way and is often of quite poor quality. It’s not that there isn’t enough information out there, but patients and carers say it’s hard to find relevant and reliable material, particularly if they are searching for locally produced information.

CancerLinks is a portal to local, national and international patient information from over 170 cancer organisations (charities, professional websites, help groups and public sector sources). Each organisation is quality assessed to ensure that the information they produce is accessible, usable and reliable before they are included in CancerLinks. This is done using the Minervation validation instrument for healthcare websites.

Providing local information

Cancer patients need to know what’s going on where they are being treated. It’s vital that the information they are given is focused and ideally it should come from their local cancer team. CancerLinks makes this level of information-giving possible by creating separate websites for each local cancer Trust within the main CancerLinks portal. So if the patient lives in Milton Keynes they can select their local area (Buckinghamshire North) and be given patient information leaflets produced by the local team at the Milton Keynes Hospital, alongside the same national and international information that everyone else sees. Patients in Oxford will see Oxford local information, patients in Reading will see Berkshire West etc.

Cost-effective and sustainable

The business model for this venture is simple. A central database of national and international cancer links has been created and this quality-assured content feeds into all local websites. Each local site also has space to house its own locally produced leaflets, which sit alongside the core material. All sites within CancerLinks have a consistent look and feel, with different colour palettes and logos used to differentiate between them.

Quickly building a website from this core system, local sites can create a significant web presence for their patients within a matter of days, at an extremely low cost. What’s more, the vast majority of their evidence-based website (design, core content, national/international links) is maintained for them on an ongoing basis by the team in Oxford. The local team simply have their own local information to keep up-to-date.

See what you think for yourself at: www.cancerlinks.org.uk