Scotland Joins Up Web Resources on Chronic Conditions

Aliss (access to local information to support self management) is an attempt to make Scots better managers of their own health by ensuring local information can be found easily online. It was created towards the end of 2008 in response to a policy pledge by the Scottish Government to develop directories of regionalised resources, and provides a specially built index for official health information...

...Development of Aliss has centred around users in local communities. During 2009 and 2010, the team worked in Edinburgh with secondary school Trinity Academy and the Clan Edinburgh literacy and numeracy project to raise awareness of how localised health information could help. Although participants' knowledge of the benefits of health self-management improved significantly, it again showed the problems of finding information.

Aliss, which is open source and therefore has no licence fees attached to it, has already been successfully tried in Renfrewshire's libraries and with Grampian Care Data, with data from the two organisations providing far more localised results...