NEWS - about carpal-tunnel.net
Carpal-tunnel.net has begun to get some attention from the wider world, some complimentary and some critical, and it seems a good idea to make some reference to that here on the site. As with the changelog I will keep more recent entries at the top of this page and date them, rather than having a revision date at the bottom of the page.
September 2015 - BBC Radio 4, Inside Health - The website was picked up by the producers of this programme and we did a short interview with Mark Porter answering some listener's questions about CTS. The podcast is available in .mp3 format from the inside health website.
September 2015 - Readability - A paper has appeared which makes an attempt to measure the readability of patient information resources on the internet for CTS (Eberlin 2015). They ran the 13 most popular sites returned by two search engines (Bing and Google) through a variety of standard readability scores. They report a composite index of these scores for the 13 sites as 13.1 with a range from 10.8 (high school sophomore) to 15.3 (university junior). This compares with a desired level for general patient information of 6th grade level. Carpal-tunnel.net, perhaps predictably in view of the quantity of information here, was rated as a difficult read, approximate US grade level 16. The easiest to read was the AAOS site with a score of 10.8. I do use a readability checker (www.readability-score.com) to monitor what I am writing and, for example the introductory 'Basic CTS' page has a Flesch Kincaid grade level of 7 with a reading ease score of 59.1 (>60 is considered desirable) but other pages of this site are intended for readers who want to explore the more obscure areas of uncertainty about CTS and are unavoidably more dificult in terms of both language and the complexity of the concepts being discussed. Nevertheless I do believe in 'plain English' and I am open to suggestions for simpler wording and also simply to people highlighting any sections which are especially hard to understand. Please put any such suggestions in the website forum. This page has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 7.5!
June 2015 - Quality of CTS information on the web - A Swiss group has published a study of the quality of information available on the internet for patients with CTS (Frueh 2015). Carpal-tunnel.net was ranked equal 6th in the top ten, one point below the Wikipedia article on CTS. The assessment was made on a fairly old version of the site but I think the major reason that all of the resources examined scored relatively poorly was that they were assessed using a tool which was designed for scoring the quality of patient information leaflets handed out before surgery and that is not the role of most patient information websites. Their top-ten list includes many of the resources which I have recommended on the links page. I am waiting for further feedback from Dr Frueh as to what we can improve here and I have incorporated some information about that study and the other sites which they felt scored highly into the links page.
November 2013 - NHS Innovations Prize - This NHS scheme rewards innovative ideas arising within the health service and attempts to spread them around as examples of 'best practice'
