5 CS Website Evaluation Paper

Health information used by healthcare professionals as well as consumers should come from a trusted and reliable source. There are thousands of websites, online services, and ‘apps’ available for use that provide health information to anyone searching for it. The importance of knowing what is trustworthy cannot be underestimated for the safety of information recipients (National Cancer Institute, 2015). The content of the Internet is unregulated so confidence level in the content should be assessed and the content reliability questioned (National Network of Libraries of Medicine, 2016; UCSF, 2016)? What is it that makes a website ‘good’? How do you assess these resources before making decisions about a health treatment or condition? Evaluation of websites is a currently researched area resulting in a variety of suggested criteria, methods, and techniques. This paper will provide an evaluation of the website Crohn’s and Colitis Canada using the 5 Cs website …show more content…
As more people use and are guided to the internet to access health information, health professionals need to become skilled in systematically reviewing websites so that they can advise patients as to the most appropriate ones (Ryan, Haroon & Melvin, 2015). The 5Cs website evaluation tool is one such review tool that provides a structured guide to website evaluation, giving tips and suggesting key considerations and can be useful to assess. The 5 Cs identifies five key areas that need to be addressed in a comprehensive website evaluation--credibility, currency, content, construction and clarity (Roberts, 2010). See Appendix A for a graphic representation of the tool. The following sections will explore each of these areas to evaluate the Crohn’s and Colitis Canada