Website of the Department of Health

Ongoing advances in medicine

That medical science has advanced significantly in the last few decades is widely recognised. However, few people appreciate that medicine has advanced more since World War II than in all of earlier history.

Information overload

In 1989 Richard Wurman reported that "a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.'' 

Growth in the amount of choice we face

Increasing emphasis on choice in all areas of life mean that consumers face more, and more complex, decisions about their health and social care.
 
Advances in medicine and in particular the increasing importance attached to patient choice almost, everywhere mean that we face more and more complex choices about our health, and we have to make these choices faced with an ever increasing mountain of information. The same trends – particularly that of individual empowerment and choice – apply to social care as much as to health care.

As we learned from the report “Assessing the quality of information to support people in making decisions about their health and healthcare” (commissioned by the Department of Health from the Picker Institute in 2006), the quality of health and social care information is variable across England. This creates a real need for a mechanism that will raise the quality of information, and provide reassurance to people that the information they choose comes from a reliable source.