Map of Medicine partners with NHS Choices

Tags: AIM Map of Medicine NHS Choices website

03 Jul 2007

Map of Medicine, an NHS-funded knowledge management tool, is partnering with the new NHS Choices website to provide patients with access to its Healthguides clinical information.

Healthguides has been created by more than 500 doctors and nurses to give users the same in-depth clinical information used in the NHS, in charts. The website will aim to help prepare patients for their next appointment or to find out more about a health topic.

The clinical knowledge is visually presented in more than 370 patient “journeys”, which cover content across all major diagnostic areas including accident and emergency, internal medicine, surgery, paediatrics, obstetrics, gynaecology, oncology and palliative care.

Patients visiting NHS Choices will be able to click through links to the Map of Medicine Healthguides website if they would like to view detailed information.

Using the website, patients will have a step by step guide to help them understand their condition and be able to talk about it to their GP. They should feel better prepared for an appointment with their GP, and are able to consider printing off pages from the site containing health information which they can then show to a doctor. The site will be seen as a credible site because it has been developed by and for the NHS.

For GP’s Map of Medicine will empower patients by providing more information on treatment options and possible future tests. Patients can come to a consultation with an better idea of what the problem is, which can help save time during consultations and GP’s can rest assured that they are using a credible NHS resource as a source of information for patients.

There are 20 pathways currently available on the Map of Medicine which are: psoriasis, diabetes, osteoporosis, hepatitis C, tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, acute asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), smoking cessation, depression, dementia, caesarean section, labour, emergency contraception, contraception, breast cancer, prostate cancer, glaucoma and osteoarthritis.

“The Map” is the result of six years work by a dedicated team involving more than 500 doctors and nurses and stems from an original partnership between the Royal Free and University College Medical School, the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust and the NHS National Library for Health. The Map of Medicine is now owned by Informa plc.

It is designed to help NHS organisations agree and adopt local best-practice according to current and future configuration of healthcare services, enable patient care pathways to be customised with local clinical and administrative notes to better organise interactions between primary and secondary care.

It should also improve patient care by saving clinical staff time keeping up to date with the latest best practice and evidence based clinical guidelines.

Reader's Comments

Lack of joined up thinking

andy.hadley@ferndown.nhs.uk

05 Jul 07 22:07

Whilst the versions of Map of Medicine for use by clinicians are intended to be localised to reflect local circumstances and arrangements, the Healthguide information does not tie to this.

So this risks a GP having one pathway, and his/her patient a different one. A recipe for argument, or at least confusion and misunderstanding. Whilst "extended choice" means patients may be seen elsewhere, it should be possible to present common pathways based on the intended location of care.