Review of the Quality of Complementary Medicines Information Resources

National Prescribing Service, 2009. — 54 p.Сравнительное исследование информационных ресурсов по комплементарной медицине. Рассмотрены 52 ресурса, выделены наиболее достоверные.Recent research conducted by the National Prescribing Service (NPS) has shown the need for improving complementary medicines (CMs) information availability and awareness for Australian health professionals and consumers. CMs information resources have been reported to be of variable quality, with some identified as inaccurate or misleading. To date, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of available information resources on CMs. In 2008, NPS commissioned an independent evaluation of CMs information resources to help the Australian community make better informed decisions around the quality use of CMs, in order to meet the demand for high quality information on CMs.A search identified 52 CMs information resources from reputable sources, which were submitted to a brief short-listing process which considered: accessibility and currency, content, transparency, coverage and accuracy. If one resource within a package passed the short-listing process, any other resources which was interlinked within the package was evaluated in the in-depth review. The short-listing process identified resources from 19 information providers, with 26 resource variants for the in-depth review. Of these, there were six resources identified as the highest quality (Tier 1). This ranking was based on their total score, and scores for all domains: technical quality, content quality and clinical utility being above the upper 95% confidence interval of the mean of all short-listed resources. They were (in rank order):