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WRPR 122 : Writing About Public Health (HC)
BASIC MEDICAL INFORMATION :
The Merck manual of medical information -- Home Edition
Explains disease etiology, symptoms, diagnosis, complications, treatment and prevention in simple English. In-text concepts and terminology are hyperlinked to other relevant contexts. Multimedia resources (animations, audio, photographs and videos) help illustrate complex subjects. Each topic has links to an audio glossary and multimedia.
MedlinePlus
from the National Library of Medicine -Comprehensive site with information on drugs and supplements, medical dictionary and encyclopedia and convenient access to both consumer and professional level literature.
CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Excellent resource for reliable and up-to-date information. Cross over from consumer level to professional level information easily, as well as going from general to specific inquiries. Data and statistics are readily available on all diseases and conditions. Links to public health journals and other initiatives facilities your research project.
Healthfinder.gov
A one-stop information source to learn about disease conditions, patient education and research and patient support organizations for specific conditions. Sponsored by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
DICTIONARIES & GLOSSARIES:
Dictionary of statistics & methodology
Publisher: Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publications, c2005.
"The Third Edition of the Dictionary of Statistics & Methodology: A Nontechnical Guide for the Social Sciences is the sourcebook of simple definitions and explanations of statistical and statistics-related concepts. Since the publication of the bestselling Second Edition, author W. Paul Vogt has examined relevant literature in the social sciences to keep readers alert to the appearance of new methods, new languages, and newly popular terms. The Third Edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded, with 400 additional definitions and illustrations compiled from readers' requests and suggestions."--BOOK JACKET.
Glossary of insurance terms
Compiled by Cover the Uninsured.
Health Promotion Glossary from the WHO
New Terms added to the Health Promotion Glossary
An addendum to the 1997 edition.
Medical Dictionary from National Library of Medicine
A feature of MedlinePlus.
MEDICAL NEWS :
Medical News Today
A daily health and medical news service covering numerous disease categories. A searchable archive back to 2003 and a built-in medical dictionary and a clinical trials search box enhance the site. Many global ethnic and minority health concerns are covered here
Harvard World Health News
This online news digest service from the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health offers a combination of orginal reporting and a digest of news stories from newspapers and magazines worldwide on pressing public health issues.The "News and Commentary" section focusses on health news from Africa, North America, Asia and Europe.
DATABASES (for reports and journal articles on your topic)
Access world news
Provider: NewsBank
Newspaper collections from NewsBank provide full-text articles from the electronic editions of record for more than 700 newspapers around the globe, including the NY Times (2000-present). Database covers 1977-present.
LexisNexis academic
Provider: LN
Full-text of thousands of newspapers, magazines, news transcripts, reference works, and legal materials. Includes NY Times (1980-current)
ProQuest Research Library
Provider: ProQuest
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present. A great first database to search. Numerous sources range from popular magazines to peer-reviewed science journals.
PubMed
Provider: NCBI
Includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. Includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources. PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's search service that provides access to over 11 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases, with links to participating online journals. PubMed contains bibliographic citations and abstracts from approximately 3900 current biomedical journals. Many journals are available through our subscription or free courtesy of PubMed Central. Follow the MORE! link to see if we can get access for you through TriCollege or InterLibrary loan.
PubMed central
Provides full-text access to life sciences journal literature. Sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Coverage dates vary by journal. Many public health journals concerning minority and ethnic health topics can be found here by keyword search. It is a good complementary source to a PubMed search.
Web of science
Provider: ISI
For Haverford College users, this provides access to the Social Sciences Citation Index 1997-present , Science Citation Index 1972 - present. Search for scholarly articles in any discipline, or for articles that cite a known author or work. Coverage varies. Not just for citation searching (who cited whom) but also for general topic searching.
SPECIAL TOPIC: Health Insurance:
Managing Medical Bills: Strategies for Navigating the Health Care System
Essential reading! The National Endowment for Financial Education, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, commissioned this series of 3 electronic booklets on medical insurance from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. This series addresses the types of medical insurance available to consumers, to inform them of their rights and to provide additional resources to persue reliable answers to their questions. Also has useful advice on how to work through often encountered bureacratic processes.
To access:
First in series: Understanding Private Health Insurance
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Understand_Private_Health_Insurance.pdf
Second in series: Medicare and Medicaid, a Health Care Safety Net for People with Serious Disabilities and Chronic Conditions
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Medicare_and_Medicaid_Safety_Net.pdf
This booklet has a directory of state Medicaid Offices nationwide in Chapter 5.
Third in series: Options for Avoiding and Managing Medical Debt
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Avoid_and_Manage_Medical_Debt.pdf
To access:
First in series: Understanding Private Health Insurance
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Understand_Private_Health_Insurance.pdf
Second in series: Medicare and Medicaid, a Health Care Safety Net for People with Serious Disabilities and Chronic Conditions
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Medicare_and_Medicaid_Safety_Net.pdf
This booklet has a directory of state Medicaid Offices nationwide in Chapter 5.
Third in series: Options for Avoiding and Managing Medical Debt
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/nefe/uploadfiles/Avoid_and_Manage_Medical_Debt.pdf
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Website
The Kaiser Family Foundation website has a section devoted to the explanation of each type of medical insurance program. There is a user-friendly search tool for additional coverage for Medicaid by state. Numerous fact sheets capture public health in all its aspects, from minority health to health economics to perceptions in health politics '08.
Cover the Uninsured
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation originally started this project to bring awareness to Cover the Uninsured Week in 2005, and it continues to make the case for equitable and expanded health coverage for all. Some notable features are:
A search tool for finding health insurance for each state:
http://covertheuninsured.org/stateguides/
Facts sheets on the uninsured and its consequences
http://covertheuninsured.org/facts/
Happenings tool to find out what is going on in your neighborhood to help correct this situation
http://covertheuninsured.org/facts/
A search tool for finding health insurance for each state:
http://covertheuninsured.org/stateguides/
Facts sheets on the uninsured and its consequences
http://covertheuninsured.org/facts/
Happenings tool to find out what is going on in your neighborhood to help correct this situation
http://covertheuninsured.org/facts/
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
An agency under Health and Human Services, this web portal has information esepcially relevant to issues of social justice, equality in access to healthcare arising from ethnic, race, class and language factors. Special data and survey section has detailed background notes on statistical gathering initiatives, search engines, summary tables and reports.
Medical Expenditure Panel Survey
The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which began in 1996, is a set of large-scale surveys of families and individuals, their medical providers (doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc.), and employers across the United States. MEPS collects data on the specific health services that Americans use, how frequently they use them, the cost of these services, and how they are paid for, as well as data on the cost, scope, and breadth of health insurance held by and available to U.S. workers.
The summary data tables is especially useful to get a sense of the kind of data available, addressing coverage status to various population characteristics.
The summary data tables is especially useful to get a sense of the kind of data available, addressing coverage status to various population characteristics.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
CMS is a federal agency under the US Dept of Health and Human Services. In addition to Medicare and Medicaid, the Center also runs SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and Clinical Laboratory Imjprovement Amendments (CLIA). This website is a portal for all types of claims, expenditure, enrollment and characteristics of beneficiaries.
SPECIAL TOPIC: Vaccines:
Vaccine Approval Process
CDC Vaccines Homepage
National Immunization Survey (NIS)
Random digit-dialing telephone survey for monitoring of childhood immunizations. Immunization coverage rate can be obtained at this website.
WHO Immunization Safety Project
Provides "up-to-date factual information, global policies, best practices and resource documents, including training and communication material, in the area of immunization safety."
National Network for Immunization Information (NNII)
Immunization science, vaccine science, types of vaccines and the diseases they target, news, journal article synopsis and commentary and more from Immunizations for Public Health (I4PH), a Texas-based nonprofit corporation dedicated to making immunization information available to those who need it. Information on this site is reviewed by immunology experts. Vaccines can be looked up by the diseases they target.
A press room collects all the latest news on vaccines. Sign up for email delivery.
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/pressroom/newsbriefs.cfm
A press room collects all the latest news on vaccines. Sign up for email delivery.
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/pressroom/newsbriefs.cfm
STATISTICS PORTALS :
U.S. Census Bureau
Central agency to collect data on the population demographics but also on many other social, political and economic dimensions including insurance, disability, aging, health, state and local profiles.
National Center for Health Statistics
THE data hub for all statistics from CDC!
FedStats - Federal Government
Federal government statistics collected from over 70 agencies.
State Health Facts Online - Kaiser Family Foundation
CDC Wonder
CDC Wonder is a menu-driven system that provides access to statistical research data published by CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), of which the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is an agency, as well as reference materials, reports and guidelines on health-related topics.
Users can create custom queries to data sets such as mortality (deaths), cancer incidence, HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, vaccinations, natality (births), census data and many other topics. Results are readily summarized and analyzed, with dynamically calculated statistics, charts and maps in text, html or spreadsheet formats which are quite user-friendly.
Users can create custom queries to data sets such as mortality (deaths), cancer incidence, HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, vaccinations, natality (births), census data and many other topics. Results are readily summarized and analyzed, with dynamically calculated statistics, charts and maps in text, html or spreadsheet formats which are quite user-friendly.
Health Stastistics on the Web (University of Michigan)
Comprehensive by subject with annotations for each site's content.
Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce
GLOBAL STATISTICS:
WHO Health Statistics: Evidence and Information for Health Policy
The WHO Statistical Information System is the guide to health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information available from the World Health Organization. An important report is the World Health Report, published annually. You can find the core health indicators for countries here.
OECD Statistics Page
OECD is Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose membership consists of 30 countries in western and eastern Europe. Also includes Japan and Korea, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. It collects health statistics from its members and has relationships with other developing countries such as China, Brazil and Russia.
HNPStats
HNPStats- the World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population data platform - a one-stop data source for health, nutrition and population indicators from various national and international data sources. It provides direct access to more than 100 indicators, with time series for countries and country groups from 1960 to the most recent year, where data are available.