Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To combine the need of patients and their families for comprehensive disease-specific web resources with a unique learning experience for medical students.
DESCRIPTION: The internet has become an important primary and secondary source of medical information for parents of children with cancer. Although many web resources exist for pediatric cancer, very few provide relevant details concerning the diagnosis, treatment options, available clinical trials, social support, long-term follow up care, other available web resources, or research conducted on a particular pediatric cancer. By having medical students develop these web sites, the creation of these web resources can be combined with a unique education experience for medical students. This process enables students to learn how to search for, evaluate quality and synthesize medical information, to think about the information from a patient's perspective, and to work with a team of medical professionals, communication specialists and web designers. Thus, medical students can learn not only about the disease itself but also how to improve communication with patients and their families. Although the creation of web resources is integrated into some medical school curricula, the products are only produced for a grade and not released for public use. For this project, comprehensive web resources were created by the students for osteosarcoma and for renal tumors. Students were provided with articles on how to write patient materials and they evaluated other web resources. After the students researched the disease, they discussed their findings with attending physicians and then translated the information into lay language. Working with a communication specialist and a web designer, the students organized the information into an easy to use format for parents, created the template, and uploaded the text and images to the Indiana University Cancer Center website (http://cancer.iu.edu/osteosarcoma//, http://cancer.iu.edu/renaltumors//).
CONCLUSION: Creating much needed comprehensive web resources provides an invaluable resource for parents of children with cancer and a unique learning experience for medical students. The next goal is to involve medical students in the development of tools to evaluate these web resources. This evaluation will measure and analyze the usage of the web resources by analyzing website use statistics, asking for online user feedback, administering more in-depth web-based surveys, and working with parents and patients at the Cancer Center at Riley Hospital.
Article PDF
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Paine, J., Odueyungbo, M., Doucette, E. et al. 55 Student Learning Through the Development of Comprehensive Disease-Specific Web Resources for Pediatric Oncology.. Pediatr Res 60, 499 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-200610000-00077
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-200610000-00077