Citation
(2009), "Internet review", Health Education, Vol. 109 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/he.2009.142109aag.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Internet review
Article Type: Internet review From: Health Education, Volume 109, Issue 1
Diabetes
In the UK there are currently over 2 million people who have been diagnosed with diabetes. Another 500,000 have diabetes but do not yet know it. Greatly simplifying, diabetes is a condition in which the amount of glucose in the blood is too high because the body is unable to use it properly. If left unchecked diabetes can lead to heart disease, blindness, kidney disease and a number of other serious illnesses.
Type 1 diabetes, which is the least common of the two types, usually appears before the age of 40 years of age and affects 5-15 per cent of people with diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form and accounts for between 85-95 per cent of all people with diabetes. It usually appears after the age of 40 years although in Asian and Afro-Caribbean people it often appears after the age of 25 years. One worrying trend is that diabetes is now being diagnosed in younger people and has even been found in children as young as seven years.
In the case of Type 2 diabetes, although herdity factors are important, lifestyle choices are also a major contributor to the development of the condition. We may not be able to choose who our parents are but we can choose to adopt a healthy lifestyle that might mitigate against the development of the condition. It is in this context that health education and the Internet can play an important part.
Diabetes UK
Diabetes UK is the leading diabetes charity in the UK and as well as supporting people with diabetes it also funds research and organises campaigns. One of the interesting features of this web site that users may or may not notice is that the banner heading of the Home page has three different forms that change each time the user accesses the web site. In one form a rather good video “Bendy Bus” can be viewed. This short clip is in YouTube format and in it a small group of teenagers are seen messing about on a bus, name calling and so on. As this develops the problem of diabetes is raised and during their discussions the viewer will learn some important facts about the condition.
A second form of this banner advertises free web space for professional members, and a third form deals with how diabetes can be managed during Ramadan. Very interesting use of banner “advertisements”.
As a whole the web site is aimed at three main groups. For people with diabetes, and their families, there is a great deal of support material in the form of online guides to the condition. The “Your Stories” section is quite common in this type of web site and it is a useful addition here. Reading about how other people are coping with the problems of diabetes can be reassuring, especially for the newly diagnosed.
The “Get Involved” section offers lots of tips and ideas for fundraising, campaigning and volunteering. There is also information on Diabetes Week in the UK and the world wide event “World Diabetes Day”.
The third section of this web site is aimed at academics and professionals. A number of useful publications can be freely downloaded from this section and the publication “Research Matters” looks particularly interesting. For the professional involved with diabetes information can be found on courses and conferences as well as a “Shared Practice” section that would seem very worthwhile.
Finally, because fundraising is crucial to the success of this type of organisation, there is an online shop where users can buy books, travel items and you can even order a diabetes credit card.
American Diabetes Association
This is the North American sister organisation of Diabetes UK and there are many similarities in the design of the two web sites. In this web site the banner advertisements are more conventional in that a flash display presents a slide show of five advertisements, all with a diabetes theme.
The section “All About Diabetes” contains pretty much what a user might expect but one novel feature is the diabetes risk calculator. After entering details of your height, weight, family history and a few other things, the user is given an indication of the extent to which they are at risk of developing diabetes. From here it is possible to access further information on how to better manage that risk, if required.
Another interesting feature of this web site is the “Ask an Expert” section. Here users can post a question to an expert who will endevour to answer the question online. To avoid duplication, the ten most popular questions, and their answers, are posted in this section of the web site. At present the only expert available deals with eye problems associated with diabetes but the web site will soon have experts in pharmacy, dentistry and nutrition.
The section aimed at diabetes professionals is particulary impressive with an extensive library of resources including research publications, materials for patient education, and a very good multimedia bank.
Online shops attached to charity web sites can sometimes appear to be a bit of a token gesture with only a few products available. The online shop associated with this web site however is very different and certainly worth a visit if only to admire the massive range of items on sale. As well as the usual books, there are pages and pages of gift items, CD’s, videos and even clothes.
This is a well-designed web site and even if you are not particularly interested in diabetes, it provides a good example of how health education web sites should be constructed.
Diabetes UK
Diabetes UK describes itself as the online “global diabetes communitiy”. Where it differs from the previous web sites is that this has the feel of a social networking web site rather than just an information provider. Indeed users are encouraged to use and share the web site with other people via Facebook, Delicious and other more obvious social networking web sites. This is an interesting departure for health education web sites and one that is to be encouraged.
The content of this web site is well presented including novel items such as podcasts but also items that do not work, such as podcasts! Very frustrating. Similarly, the blood sugar calculator works fine but the BMI calculator does not! This is not strictly true, all these things do work, but only if you are using Internet Explorer, it seems that these features were not designed for the Firefox browser. This is an important point for web site developers, content must be tested on a variety of browsers before going public.
The text based content of this web site is very good and the listed “Diabetes Guides” is extremely comprehensive with everything you would expect and a great deal more. This section alone probably has more information than the two previous web sites combined.
Original features on this web site include a “Diabetic Insurance” section where diabetic users can buy life and travel insurance. A competitions section offers users the chance to win a Bupa health screening or a Blood Glucose meter. Unfortunately the inevitable online shop is very limited in its stock and probably is not worth visiting.
YouTube-Diabetes
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7yHZ11V3D8
Many of us probably think of YouTube as a vehicle for bored teenagers to post videos of their latest pranks. While this may be true up to a point, YouTube is also an excellent resource for health education videos and the section on diabetes is well worth exploring. At the time of writing there were over 40 video clips dealing with various aspects of diabetes though beware the quality of the content does vary considerably. Some clips are litle more than animated slide shows though even these can be informative. Other clips are the video equivalent of the “Your Stories” sections in conventional web sites. Here people describe what it is like for them to have been diagnosed with diabetes and how they live with its daily consequences.
There are many excellent clips describing what diabetes is, how it develops and how it is treated. Sometimes it is possible to identify the source of this information and therefore evaluate its veracity. On other occasions this is not possible and therefore users should be cautious in accepting what is being said.
YouTube does provide a star rating for each of these videos, but this is not necssarily related to the accuracy of what is being shown. Some of these clips have obviously been submitted by the charlatans and snake oil salesmen who infest much of the web and therefore the videos should be viewed with this in mind.
The other danger with web sites of this type is that after searching for a particular topic, like diabetes, as well as being presented with specific results, users may also be given a list of related videos and before long find themseves being distracted and dragged off to parts of the internet they would rather not view!
Undoubtedly, YouTube and similar video based web sites will offer enormous potential as health education resources. At present the content may be limited and the quality somewhat dubious, but health educators should be thinking about how they can exploit this technology to their advantage.