The Evaluation of Anaesthesia-related Information on the Internet

Abstract

The quality and accessibility of anaesthesia-related information available to patients on the internet is a growing concern for the specialty. We sought to evaluate the quality of anaesthesia-related websites using a simple scoring system.The scoring system comprised quality and technical scores individually, and these were also combined into a total score. Test-retest reliability was assessed by calculating intraclass correlation coefficients. We employed the four most popular search engines and one meta-search engine, using the search term "general anaesthesia". Only the first 10 sites retrieved were scored.The intraclass correlation coefficients for all terms demonstrated at least moderate agreement and the total scores demonstrated high consistency r=0.852, 0.774 (P <0.001, and P <0.003 respectively). There were 18 duplicate websites and 32 were scored. There was no difference between search engines for any of the three scores awarded. The majority of websites were rated as either 'poor' or 'fair' across all scores. Our study indicates that quality anaesthesia-related information is unlikely to be retrieved by patients using the internet.

Factors influencing the level of patients using the internet to gather information before anaesthesia: a single-centre survey of 815 patients in Switzerland

“…The majority of them used conventional search engines. It is very likely that the nature and quality of the information found varied greatly [16, 17, 23]. It remains unclear how involved the government, health organizations and hospitals ideally should be in order to improve patient information and satisfaction.…”

Surfing for mouth guards: assessing quality of online information

“…Earlier studies about information on osteoporosis, anxiety disorders treatment and knee arthroscopy experienced a similar situation during identification of relevant websites (18,32,33). (1,9,10,20,32,34,35) 23 (5,6,7,8,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,21,22,23,24,25,26,29,30,36,37,39) The amount of information available on the Internet is increasing, and thus, concern has been expressed about the quality of this information. Despite this concern, only a handful of studies have recently assessed the quality of health-related information on different topics, such as epilepsy (34), anaesthesia (19,35), breast cancer (23,36), menopause (37), asthma (38), osteoporosis (33), chronic pain (19), scoliosis (39), urology (14,22), anxiety disorders (18) and cystic fibrosis (21).…”

“…Corcoran et al. (20) excluded from their questionnaire items with the lowest inter‐rater reliability, leaving a distilled score, which was utilized in our study to measure reliability. To decrease observer bias, the evaluation of each site was made on three separate occasions during a period of 3 weeks.…”

“…Some articles assess reliability based on the criteria identified by Eysenbach et al (17) in their systematic review of assessing the quality of health information for consumers on the World Wide Web (WWW) (18)(19)(20)(21). Other studies have employed an organization's generic tools or established principles.…”

“…Established principles that have been employed are HON principles and the European Commission Quality Criteria for health-related websites (23,24). Other researchers have developed their own scoring systems to evaluate the contents on the websites (14,(19)(20)(21)23). Consensus, however, has not yet been achieved.…”