Mediadoctor is an interesting Canadian web site where academics and clinicians from three Canadian universities are reading and rating news coverage of medical issues. As well as providing story-by-sory ratings on a five-star basis, the site also has a comparison of media sources showing their ongoing average score, details of the criteria used for the reviews, profiles of those doing the reviewing, links, comments and a forum. From the about page:
The goal of Media Doctor Canada is to improve Canadian media coverage of new medical drugs and treatments. The Media Doctor Canada team reviews current news stories about medical drugs and treatments, and assesses the stories’ quality using a standardised rating scale. Using a five star system, we evaluate stories based on how well they do, providing the important information you need to make an informed decision about the drug or treatment being reported on.
Specific Objectives
Ensure that, when possible, all important information associated with new treatments are reported, including benefits, harms, costs, adverse effects, availability, and conflict of interest.
Establish the interest and usefulness in providing alerts to GPs on media coverage of new treatments.
Establish a website called Media Doctor to provide feedback to journalists about the quality of their news stories.
Evaluate the impact of Media Doctor on the quality of reports on new medical treatments in the lay press using time series analysis of serial scores achieved by individual media outlets.
To investigate the international potential for such a process, especially in developing countries.
I like this very much and not just because of the potential to improve the generally poor state of mainstream medical coverage. By bringing medical coverage from Canada’s major news outlets together and applying a screen of knowledge to it, Media Doctor has the potential to emerge as a go-to source for information on the state of medicine in Canada.
SOURCE: Colby Cosh | TAGS: MEDIA, MEDICAL NEWS, CANADA
