From the Editor

I’m excited to inform readers that this is my first issue as Editor of the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet. I have “big shoes” to fill as I follow M. Sandra Wood, MLS, MBA, who served as founding Editor of this journal in 1997, when it began as Health Care on the Internet, and remained Editor through the first two issues of 2018.

This issue marks the final submission of two of our Column Editors, Mary Katherine (Mary-Kate) Haver (Book Reviews) and Catherine (Kay) Hogan Smith (Consumer Resources Review). We extend our sincere thanks to them for their dedicated service to the journal. Beginning with our next issue, we welcome two new Column Editors, Ilyse Kramer for the Book Reviews Column and Kat Phillips for the Consumer Resources Review Column.

The aims of the journal remain: it is aimed at medical and public librarians who provide health information to the general public and patients, and at librarians and health care personnel who are involved with patient education and health literacy.

The need to provide the general public and patients with accurate authoritative and reliable health care information is greater than ever. Searching for health information is one of the main reasons people access the internet, and we live in an information-rich world. Yet paradoxically, a significant part of the population are medically underserved and truly do not know how to access good health care, let alone where and how to find information.

A major challenge in connecting the consumer with quality health information is society’s pervasive mind-set that all health information can be found by accessing “Dr. Google” or social media, and most don’t check, or even think to check, the source of the information; they simply “don’t know what they don’t know.”

In addition, health literacy, “The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” (NNLM n.d.) is a major issue preventing patients from understanding their encounters with clinicians, especially in today’s difficult-to-navigate healthcare environment.

The Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet is a forum where librarians and health care personnel can share their initiatives in proactively providing the general public and patients with understandable, accurate, authoritative, and reliable consumer health information.

I invite you to please consider writing a column or an article for the journal, and share with us your experiences.