Get the best from medicines
How we keep up standards
It is vital that we make this website:
easy to read
have everything you need to help you make a decision
up to date
accurate and correct
fair and balanced
To do this, we use a series of guides to help us:
IPDAS
These are the "International Patient Decision Aid Standards" (www.ipdasi.org). These give us a really good list of all the things you need to know to help you make a decision. IPDAS has 33 essential questions to be answered. These are grouped into 12 separate areas, and into 3 main ideas: content, development and how useful it is. It also has a further 25 questions to be answered if possible.
We wouldn't argue with any of what IPDAS requires, but it is a real challenge to try to do. For example, one question that must be answered is "what happens if I do nothing?". Until we read this, we'd never really thought about how to put this in words. Having done a lot of research, it seems that very few other people have either! We are working on this at the moment and hope to have these answers soon.
Readability (SMOG/FRY)
SMOG is the "Simple Measure Of Gobbledegook", and is a good way of seeing how easy something is to read. There are other measures e.g. Fry, Flesch, Fog etc. Basically it means that something is more readable if it has short sentences, and not too many long words (words with one or two syllables are best).
A score of 8 means you need about 8 years education to be able to understand something. A score of around 8 is good, as it matches popular newspapers. One "patient information" site we looked at had a score of 14 (about the same as "The Times"). Another "Patient Decision Aid" had a SMOG score so far off the scale you would need a degree and a PhD to understand it. Most UK Government documents have a score of 20, but they don't have to try because you can't ignore them. When the score gets to 30, it generally means the Government is trying to hide something by making it unreadable!
We aim for a score of 9 or lower, although this is hard sometimes if you include a medicine name like levomepromazine, which has 6 syllables.
User group
We have a user group made up of some members of the Service User Council of our NHS Trust. They look at the site and tell us what they think is right, what's wrong and what's missing.
CMHP
The College of Mental Health Pharmacy is the main body of pharmacists working in mental health in UK. College members monitor the site to make sure it is up to date and giving you the right information. Twice a year members of CMHP closely examine 2 conditions and 5 medicines. They check the readability, accuracy, links and content, and then tell us what needs doing. The last review was in autumn 2011 by Michelle Sie and Hannah Macfarlane and they submitted 20 pages of comments, but overall were very pleased e.g. "I find this a fantastic resource for patients and learned a lot from this review, discovering new items I had not known about before."
My mum
Steve's mum also reads the site and documents and, a bit like the user group, isn't afraid to tell her son what she thinks if it isn't spot on.
Feedback
We receive emails from lots of people making comments e.g. ideas for new bits, changing the wording, disagreeing, agreeing etc. Each email is taken seriously and, where possible, changes are made as a result.