Improving access to on-line health information for Australian men with prostate cancer

Carole B Pinnock _a, Craig Jones _a and the Education Committee of the Australian Prostate Cancer Collaboration
a: Urology Unit, Repatriation General Hospital, Daw Park, South Australia and Flinders University of South Australia

Objectives: To provide needs-based health information to Australian men with prostate cancer: strategies to maximise access

Abstract: Australian men face barriers to accessing information on prostate cancer. Older men have poor access to internet based information, particularly if low income. Rural men have poor access to a specialist Urologist services and often need to travel long distances to access them; prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment is difficult to understand, uncertain and yet too much information can be as great a barrier to understanding as too little.. We established a web site which provided high quality needs-based information to Australian men. Evaluation of the first two years of use and comparison with needs- assessment has been published elsewhere. This paper describes strategies which were used in the development of the website to address the above barriers to access. Integrating the promotion of the website with off-line sources of information proved very successful in promoting use of the website. Examples were the annual prostate cancer Call or Click-in where a single national telephone help-line was promoted together with the web address. Callers to the help-line were offered the web-address literature as well as direct answers to their questions. The launch of a consumer guide was also promoted with the web address. The success of this strategy was shown by peaks in website activity at these times and particularly in no referror website referrals ie the URL was typed in directly. This type of promotion increased the proportion of visitors from our target group (Australian men) versus North American visitors. Another strategy to improve access by non-internet using men was to produce a hard copy of the website material: a loose leaf binder with downloads of each of the searchable databases, including the modular information resource. The website itself was designed to provide easy updating of hard copy downloads. This was expensive to produce and not as successful. However it served an educational purpose, so that men with no understanding of the Internet could see the type of information on the website and how it was organised. The hard copy was also used by help-lines and health centres without Internet access. In relation to geographical barriers, we provided a searchable list of Urology services and a map of distribution of Urologists which showed availability restricted to major towns and regional centres.. We addressed the problem of too much confusing information about prostate cancer by breaking up information into modules useful at progressive stages in the development of the disease. This part of the site (the Mr PHIP series) became the most widely accessed part of the site.

Conclusion: Integrating promotion of on-line prostate cancer information with off-line education initiatives assists this target group to access on-line information and is helpful in reducing non-target group traffic. Needs assessment helped us to identify other access barriers such as too much, confusing information and was an important step in setting up an effective website.