Today is International Clinical Trials Day! What better day to sign the #AllTrials petition?

International Clinical Trials Day is on Tuesday May 20th but half of all clinical trials have never been published and some have not even been registered.

Help the AllTrials.net petition get to 100,000 signatures by International Clinical Trials Day and end the era of secrecy.

Hundreds of thousands of people participated in these trials. If action is not taken urgently, information on what was done and what was found in trials could be lost forever, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine and trials being repeated unnecessarily.

Sign and share the petition at AllTrials.net.
Tweet #AllTrials.

Help us to make the best evidence accessible to the public

For over a year now, Sarah Chapman and her colleagues have been producing Evidently Cochrane, a blog that presents important new evidence from Cochrane Systematic reviews in a friendly, digestible format.

Minervation have teamed up with Sarah and her colleagues at the UK Cochrane Centre to produce a new website.

As you know, we like our evidence at Minervation. And in website development, this means asking the users what they think.

Users are the Level 1 Evidence for website design

This is where you come in!

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Blogging the Evidence with the National Elf Service

In support of the development of the National Elf Service, we are holding a FREE one-day Critical Appraisal Masterclass in Oxford on 2nd July.

If you have an interest in writing accessible evidence-based summaries using a blog format, you may wish to attend.

As well as active bloggers from the NES, you’ll work with Carl Heneghan, Director of the CEBM, Rafael Perera, Biostatistician from the University of Oxford, and Douglas Badenoch of this parish.

We’ll do hands-on appraisal of systematic reviews and get practical experience of turning them into digestible summaries for online publication. We’ll also look at the background, processes and objectives of the NES. Finally, and most importantly, we’ll have fun doing all this in an informal and friendly group of like-minded individuals.

We only have a limited number of spaces, so if you are interested, please let us know by 3pm on Friday 28th June via [email protected].

Look After Your Eyes wins award

Cool kid Look After Your Eyes, the consumer-facing website we designed and built last year for the College of Optometrists, has been named website of the year by MemCom, an industry body for membership marketing professionals.

The site was produced for members of the public who are interested in their eyes and eye health, and provides information on how the eye works, eye conditions, how to care for eyes and the role of the optometrist. The site also encourages the public to find their local optometrist using a postcode search feature.

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André is Member of the Month on the Patient Information Forum website

(This post appeared originally on the Patient Information Forum website)

I am Managing Director of Minervation and many of you will know me through my work on the PiF website.

My interests include evidence-based health care, web design, information science, usability testing, social media and blogging.

I live in Bristol and work from home and from the Minervation office, which is based in central Oxford.

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Take the 2 minute Learning Disabilities Elf survey and enter the prize draw for £30 of Amazon vouchers

The Learning Disabilities Elf helps you keep up to date with the latest reliable research, policy and guidance: http://www.thelearningdisabilitieself.net/

The team behind the site (John Northfield and André Tomlin) are running a short survey to gather feedback about the future direction of the site. You can find the survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ld-elf

Can Journalists and Health Information Professionals ever be friends?

Arm wrestle

“Journalists are all heavy drinking hacks with no idea about healthcare or scientific research. They just want to sell newspapers and further their own careers.”
– Quote from an imaginary Health Information Professional.

“Health Information Professionals are all boring, mousey nobodies who wouldn’t know a good headline if it smacked their bifocals off their face. They just want to push their side of the story and get more money for their organisation.”
– Quote from an imaginary Journalist.

These are clearly extreme versions of the truth, but it’s undeniable that these two professional groups haven’t always got on. Journalists and Health Information Professionals often seem to be at odds over key health issues, but surely if we can build good working relationships we can help each other and dramatically improve the quality of information that gets out to the general public?

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We are proud to be part of the Patient Information Forum @PIFonline

The Patient Information Forum (PiF) is the membership organisation for consumer health information producers and providers.

PiF’s main aims are:

To campaign to ensure that health information is central to high quality, patient centred care
To enable information producers and providers to effectively and efficiently deliver high quality information to patients and the public

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