Award-winning health education website sets its sights on being host with the most

Fresh from taking out the ACC Patient Safety Award at this year’s New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards | He Tohu Mauri Ora, the Health Navigator Charitable Trust is aiming higher.

“One of our big plans is to create a [health resources] content hub for the public – we want Health Navigator to be a truly broad national resource,” says clinical director and co-founder Janine Bycroft.

The trust provides people with re­liable, New Zealand-focused online resources to help them understand health conditions and manage their medicines safely.

Dr Bycroft, along with Health Navi­gator’s Jeremy Steinberg and Sandra Ponen, accepted their trophy at the awards gala held on 15 May at Auck­land’s Cordis Hotel.

The award celebrates excellence in safe practice, including outstanding innovation and leadership in patient safety, and raising awareness and sup­port for the safety of all patients in all healthcare settings.

The judges said the trust has a “huge reach” informing New Zealanders.

By the end of May, Health Navigator website page views had reached a new monthly record of 1.22 million views.

Dr Bycroft says there are many on­line health resources designed for the public, but these are fragmented. Scores of organisations provide them, from the Ministry of Health to DHBs, PHOs, general practices, allied health providers and NGOs.

She sees a role for Health Navigator, not to take over producing that infor­mation but, rather, to host it and standardise information layouts.

Doing so would put the lion’s share of available health information and ad­vice at the fingertips of consumers in accurate and easy-to-understand forms, she says.

Creating plain-English information is much harder than many people realise, and the trust has years of accumulated knowledge and copy-editing experience, Dr Bycroft says. So she believes its in­volvement can help everyone.

“None of us have the resources to go it alone, to make any door the right door, so let’s do it together.”

The trust, established in 2008, has more than 50 clinical reviewers, a web­site advisory group of more than 20 health professionals, managers, plan­ners, funders and researchers, and 13 consumer advisors, all of whom pro­vide guidance and advice on the website’s development and content.

The trust also routinely gets con­sumer feedback regarding the ease of use of its resources.