Introduction:

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) Health Education Collection is an electronic resource providing access to health education materials including patient education and professional development resources. The goal of the MUHC Health Education Collection is to support the clinical care and education efforts at the MUHC by providing an organized and accessible collection covering relevant subjects in a variety of formats.

 

Audience:

Primary
        This collection is primarily designed to be responsive to the needs of the MUHC community including patients and their
        families as well as the professional healthcare staff and students.

Secondary
        This collection also serves as a resource for health information consumers in the Montreal and Quebec regions.

Tertiary
        This collection more generally serves as a resource for health information consumers in Canada.

 

Scope & Coverage:

This collection contains both internally generated and externally generated resources in the following subject areas:

• Patient education:
  Examples include resources about health and wellness, conditions and diseases, disease prevention, procedures and therapies.
• Health Professional continuing education / professional development:
  Examples include resources about the provision of clinical care, protocols and directives for prescription medicine

 

Evaluation Criteria for Internally Generated Materials:

Patient education materials created in 2007 or earlier:

• Must meet the partial criteria of the MUHC Standards for Developing Effective Written Patient Learning Materials.
• Must be assigned a document status using the Document Status Checklist (Appendix A).

Patient education materials created in 2008 or later:

• Must meet the full criteria of the MUHC Standards for Developing Effective Written Patient Learning Materials.
• Must be assigned a document status using the Document Status Checklist (Appendix A).

 

Evaluation Criteria for Externally Generated Materials:

All externally generated materials will be evaluated before inclusion in the Health Education Collection based on the following criteria:

Need

• The material must be unique and not covered in any other resource more directly available to the MUHC community.

Relevance

• The content of the resource must satisfy the needs and must be appropriate for the level and purposes of the intended audience.

Accuracy and Currency

• The material must be up-to-date and reflect current accepted medical practice and the most recent medical research findings.

Access

• The material must be readily accessible.

Authority

• The source of the information should be clearly identified. The credibility, institutional affiliation, reputation and status of the source must be verified.

Geographic Area

• In order for this collection to properly support its primary audience, resources generated locally and designed for a local audience (Montreal region, Quebec region) will be given preference for inclusion in the collection.
• If no equivalent resource exists from a local source, materials that have originated from outside the immediate geographic area, but which have been generated within the provinces or territories of Canada will be considered for inclusion in the collection.
• Resources from geographic regions outside of Canada will only be considered for inclusion in the collection if they meet a need that has not been filled by local resources.

Languages

• English and French are the primary languages of this collection. Every attempt will be made to ensure that resources added to the collection are available in both English and French. However, when this is not possible, items that are only available in one of the main languages will be considered for inclusion provided that they meet the needs of the primary audience.
• Resources available in other languages will be included only if they meet the needs of the primary audience.

Reading Level

• The reading level must be appropriate for the intended audience.
• Patient education materials: These materials should be written within the reading levels set out by the MUHC Standards for Developing Effective Written Patient Learning Materials. The written text should be clear, and technical terms and jargon should be avoided when possible.
• Professional education materials: There are no set standards pertaining to the required reading level of these documents, as acceptable reading levels can vary widely depending on the target professional audience. However, these documents they should still be written in a clear and concise manner, and technical terms and jargon should be used only as necessary.

As with Internally Generated materials, all documents that are approved for inclusion in the Health Education Collection must be assigned a document status using the Document Status Checklist (Appendix A).

 

Formats:

The Health Education Collection collects documents in two broad formats.

Bibliographic Citation Only

The records in this collection describe items that are not available electronically. This includes, not exclusively:

• Books
• Booklets
• Pamphlets
• Factsheets
• Workbooks
• Posters
• Door Hangers
• DVDs
• CDs

When an item is not available electronically, the physical location of the item will be indicated in the record.

Full-text Documents

Whenever possible, the records in this collection are linked to electronic versions of the documents. This includes, not exclusively:

• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• MS Office Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Video files
• Adobe Flash files
• HTML or XHTML web documents

When an item is available electronically, a link to the item will be provided. For items that are available electronically from an external source, the link must be evaluated according to the Health Education Collection’s Policy for Linking External Websites (Appendix B). The physical location of an electronically available item that is also available in physical form will be indicated in the record.

 

 

 

 

(Last updated: Monday, 30 November 2009)