About Judge

The Judge project was developed in partnership between:

• Contact a Family (http://www.cafamily.org.uk) [Opens in new browser window], a UK charity which helps families who care for children with any disability or special need;
  
  
• Information Management Research Institute (IMRI), School of Informatics, Northumbria University (now Information Society Research and Consultancy Group (http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/isrc) [Opens in new browser window], School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences)  .

The project was supported by the PPP Foundation (now the Health Foundation).

The Centre for Health Information Quality (now closed) developed this Web site in collaboration with IMRI.

Project aims

How can the health consumer be empowered to judge the quality of the information they find on the Internet? The Internet is now a major source of health information. However there are concerns that some of this information is inaccurate, misleading or even dangerous.

Support group Web sites are important sources of health information. Their role and the information and support they provide needs to be widely advertised. Many support groups have their own Web sites. It is vital that these Web sites contain good quality information and are well designed.

The Judge project aimed to address these two issues by developing guidelines for judging the quality of health Web sites.

• Our guidelines for consumers aim to help people make their own way through the large quantity of information on the Internet and to judge the quality of the sites they find.
  
  
• Our guidelines for support groups aim to help such groups produce good quality Web sites.

© Copyright for this site is held by Contact a Family and the Information Society Research and Consultancy Group, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Site published February 2003. Last updated October 2006. Review date October 2007.