Irish health care Web sites: a review

The quality of health information on the World Wide Web is ver variable. There are no accepted standards for publishing health information on the Internet. Core standards for health Web sites include: authorship, attribution, disclosure and currency. Irish health care Web sites are disappointing. They are poorly designed. In the main, no target audience is specified, no details are given of dates that information is posted or updated and no e-mail contact addresses are available. There is a paucity of health information and lack of details on authorship and attribution of the information that is available. Information on services, aimed at a public audience, has an excessively high reading age. Sites provide static information and are not interactive. Little maintenance and updating of sites takes place and many are out of date.