Based on this month’s feature article, Government “Go-To” Websites, check out these government sites for professional and patient education resources.

MedlinePlus — the National Library of Medicine’s consumer health information portal is a one-stop shopping center that offers quality information and is easy to navigate. Many information pages have an “e-mail to a friend” feature making it easy to share the link or the entire content of the page. There are also over 160 interactive health tutorials with audio that patients can use on their own to learn more about a specific issue. Each tutorial includes a downloadable PDF summary page.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — features information not only on diseases and conditions, but on environmental health, travelers’ health, workplace safety, and emergency preparedness. CDC has created a set of 4 overarching health protection goals:

• Healthy People in Every Stage of Life
• Healthy People in Healthy Places
• People Prepared for Emerging Health Threats
• Healthy People in a Healthy World

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute — offers information aimed at the public and healthcare professionals. There are networking links such as the Health Information Network. Select a topic and it provides educational materials, useful articles, and links to tools and information via e-mail. NHLBI also sponsors numerous national education campaigns such as the Heart Truth for Women and Act in Time to Heart Attack Signs, both of which provide materials for health professionals.

National Institutes of Health — the main Federal agency for medical research. Many of the sites listed here fall under its purview: NLM, NHLBI, MedlinePlus, PubMed, ClinicalTrials, and the Household Products Database. Check out NIH Radio, a 24-hour audio service. Click here for a sample audio report or check out their archive going back to 2005.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration — a regulatory agency for food, drugs, biologics, and medical devices. This site offers information for the target audiences of consumers, industry, and healthcare professionals from the home page. There is a consumer multimedia section with videos, slide shows, podcasts, and audio.

Office on Women’s Health — with girls and women as the primary focus, it sponsors numerous campaigns and activities in collaboration with other agencies. Its vision is to ensure that "all women and girls are healthier and have a better sense of well being." In support of this vision, girlshealth.gov is an excellent site that promotes healthy and positive behaviors directly to girls 10 to 16 years old. Subjects cover body, fitness, drugs and alcohol, relationships, and even bullying. Their tagline is “Be Happy. Be Healthy. Be You.
Beautiful.”

ClinicalTrials — a service of NIH, provides information on clinical trials currently taking place by condition, drug intervention, sponsor, and location. It’s not law that people submit their clinical trials here but it is standard practice. This site currently lists over 80,000 clinical trials from 170 countries.

Household Products Database — based on the Consumer Products Information Database, this database links chemical ingredients to their effects on health. Consumers have been able to use this site to pin down specific ingredients causing allergy problems. Major categories include auto, home, pesticides, yard, personal care, home maintenance, arts & crafts, pets, and home office. Click here for an example of a typical profile.

Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce — very well organized site that is a collaborative effort of government agencies, public health organizations and health sciences libraries. Featured resources include Healthy People 2010 and Flu.gov which has a national flu shot locator tool and an H1N1 self-evaluation assessment tool.

PubMed — information by the millions — millions of citations for biomedical research. The PubMed database comprises more than 19 million citations for biomedical articles from MEDLINE and life science journals. Citations may include links to full-text articles from PubMed Central or publisher web sites. It has a section called Rapid Research Notes for immediate access to preliminary research reports.