NJMHS Library - Internet for Health Professionals

Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba Libraries, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Internet for Health
Professionals

Introduction

Why connect
to the Internet?

What is on the
Internet?

Evaluating Web Resources

Finding what
you want

Evaluated
Subject
Catalogues

Interactive
Learning

Discussion Lists
and
Newsgroups

Interactive Learning

The World Wide Web facilitates interactive learning with the use of multimedia. The sites below cover how the Internet is used as a medium for delivering:

virtual interactive consultations;
medical tutorials and multimedia textbooks;
interactive on-line courses;
examinations;
virtual conferencing.

Virtual Interactive Consultation

There are several good Internet sites that provide interactive patient simulations. These sites address the importance of developing the ability to diagnose illness quickly and accurately.

The Interactive Patient
http://medicus.marshall.edu/medicus.htm

University of Colorado Medical Rounds
http://www.uchsc.edu/sm/pmb/medrounds/index.html

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Medical Tutorials and Textbooks

Material relating to medical education is increasingly made available on the Internet, as a result, traditional learning patterns and practices are changing. Lecture notes are now being published on the Internet for students to peruse at a more convenient time. Below are examples of educational material available on the Internet:

Online Course in Medical Bacteriology
http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~rhbm001/intro.html

The Virtual Hospital
http://vh.radiology.uiowa.edu/

Pediatric Airway Diseases: a multimedia textbook
http://www.vh.org/Providers/Textbooks/ElectricAirway/ElectricAirway.html

Virtual Medical Centre
http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/~martindale/Medical.html

Multimedia Medical Reference Library
http://www.med-library.com/

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Interactive On-Line Courses

These Internet sites go beyond read-only hypertext tutorials.

Principles of Protein Structure - Birbeck College
http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS2/

This is a fee-based credit course on sequence analysis that includes work assignments, self-assessment exercises and tutorials that are conducted through e-mail and virtual reality discussion forums, such as BioMOO.

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On-Line Examinations

MedWeb
http://medweb.bham.ac.uk/teaching.html

The MedWeb server can be used to read and answer a series of examination-type questions. When the test is completed and you click on the 'Mark' button, and within a few minutes the results are e-mailed to you.

United Medical and Dental Schools Radiology (UMDS) Teaching File
http://www-ipg.umds.ac.uk/~acd/index.htm

This site is intended to provide educational material for all radiologists in training.