Reviews

Netlines

 For a good example of a well designed and informative organisational website, look at www.fphm.org.uk, which is the home page of the UK based Faculty of Public Health Medicine. Easy navigation allows you to explore the site rapidly, and there is something of interest for most visitors. It has all the services you would expect plus some added extras, including a huge article entitled "A chronology of state medicine, public health, welfare and related services in Britain 1066-1999."

 There are many sites about evidence based medicine, but www.cates.cwc.net is particularly good. This is the work of a general practitioner with an interest in the subject, and he provides some information about his own work that shows what can be done at the front line of healthcare delivery. A simple menu guides you to the various offerings. This is not an in-depth site, but it does show that evidence based medicine can be practised at the coalface.

 For a home page that is packed with features, www.ncemi.org/ certainly stands out. This has been designed with the emergency doctor in mind and acts as a portal to a wide range of relevant resources. Despite the number of facilities and reference guides on offer, it is user friendly and certainly not overwhelming. There is enough here to interest doctors in many specialties, not just emergency medicine.

 The Canadian Library of Family Medicine has put together a well laid out links page at www.uwo.ca/fammed/clfm/sites.html. It has plenty to offer, but, like many links pages, it needs a fair amount of scrolling. As well as a good range of primary care material, it also has some good general links.

 The Scientific Electronic Library Online (www.scielo.br/) offers a well integrated collection of Brazilian scientific journals. This allows you to access the full text of journal articles in more than one language through one interface and provides some really good content. The information can also be looked through by journal title and topic, and, of course, you can use the in-house search engine to interrogate the whole site.

Footnotes

We welcome suggestions for websites to be included in future Netlines. Readers should contact Harry Brown at the above email address.

Harry Brown, general practitioner. 

Leeds DrHarry{at}dial.pipex.com