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"Can we achieve health information for all by 2015?"
Lancet 2004 (18 July); 364: 295-300)
by Fiona Godlee, Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Dan Ncayiyana, Barbara Cohen, and Abel Packer.
This paper is the starting point for the Global Review on Access to Health Information in Developing Countries, which launched formally at the BMA London on 12th July 2004, and will run through 2004 and 2005 (see www.inasp.info/health/globalreview).
The following is an abstract of the Godlee et al paper:
Universal access to information for health professionals is a prerequisite for meeting the Millennium Development Goals and achieving Health for All. However, despite the promises of the information revolution, and some successful initiatives, there is little if any evidence that the majority of health professionals in the developing world are any better informed than they were 10 years ago. Lack of access to information remains a major barrier to knowledge-based health care in developing countries. The development of reliable, relevant, usable information can be represented as a system that requires cooperation among a wide range of professionals including health-care providers, policy makers, researchers, publishers, information professionals, indexers, and systematic reviewers. The system is not working because it is poorly understood, unmanaged, and under-resourced. This Public Health article proposes that WHO takes the lead in championing the goal of "Universal access to essential health-care information by 2015" or "Health Information for All". Strategies for achieving universal access include funding for research into barriers to use of information, evaluation and replication of successful initiatives, support for interdisciplinary networks, information cycles, and communities of practice, and the formation of national policies on health
information.
The full text of the paper is available free as a PDF document at: http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art6112web.pdf
There is also a Commentary by Christopher Bailey and Tikki Pang, from the World Health Organization:
http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04cmt96web.pdf
HTML versions of both papers are available free via www.thelancet.com
(registration is required [free]).
Richard Smith, the Editor of the BMJ, generously describes the main paper as 'hugely important':
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7458/0-h
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