ISBN: 9780230201200    Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Year of publishing: 2008     Format:  Hardback No of Pages: 240        

Welcome or not, most citizens in Western countries are unable to go through a day without receiving a dose of health information. Health information is available from, passed through, or pushed at lay citizens by healthcare professionals, alternative practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, employers, co-workers, friends and family members, vendors of health products, and government-sponsored campaigns. It is delivered through a variety of media, including, increasingly, the internet. This book examines health information provision and seeking and the roles and interactions of human and technical actors that mediate this process. New empirical data from a number of clinical and community settings- including Aboriginal communities, libraries, rural areas, online communities and radiology clinics- is used to demonstrate a new concept termed 'health info(r)mediation'. Emerging socio-technical configurations are examined. The contributors are from a diverse range of academic and practice-oriented backgrounds, resulting in a critical and theoretically-based volume grounded in the practical realities of health information use in an increasingly networked world.
Many of the chapters provide guidance for health, social service and information professionals charged with creating and/or providing health advice for citizens.
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NADINE WATHEN is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. She holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award to support her research, which includes: women's health, decision making, intervention research in the area of violence against women, translation and mobilization of research evidence to policy and practice, and projects on health information seeking and use. SALLY WYATT is Professor of Digital Cultures in Development at Maastrict University, The Netherlands, and a Senior Research Fellow with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the relationship between technological and social change, especially on issues of social exclusion and inequality. ROMA HARRIS is Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Currently, her work focuses on health information-seeking and she is leading the 'Rural HIV/AIDS Information Network Project' funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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