The institutional affiliation
The health related website http://www.commonwealthfund.org marked with the domain .org belongs to the Commonwealth Fund, an American nonprofit private foundation established in 1918 for promoting a high performing healthcare system accessible for all layers of the society, especially low-income families, young children and elderly people. The website can be easily located through different search engines as Google or Yahoo. In addition, it can be found in the ratings and lists of the most useful websites for nurses and medical personnel (Commonwealthfund.org, 2016).
The website authority sets the document with clear rules regulating the functioning of the foundation and the usage of the website. Thus, The Commonwealth Fund Code of Ethics and Conflict of Interest Policy identifies the standards and principles to be followed by each official member and user. The regulatory authorities including local data protection ones monitor the proper usage of the website and handle complaints regarding misuse of personal data or any kind of illegal actions. There is also a great variety of medicine and healthcare related information updated on a daily basis and presented in the form of blogs, different kinds of surveys, journal article summaries or infographics. Over 100 reports and other professional and scholarly works are published at the Fund’s website each year. All studies contain different points of view, as well as reflect the current issues and operate with real facts within the field of healthcare. These publications are mainly written by grantees of the Foundation, local staff, and invited experts or medicine representatives from the health policy community. The Fund also publishes reports about independent researches on healthcare issues and sends out newsletters about the latest updates to its subscribers, thus, being open about its own activity, plan of work and reached results. The Fund’s website is divided into some categories, namely, topics, publication, surveys and data, grants, and fellowships. Each of them has its subcategories where one can choose what type of information he or she is looking for, whether it is some statistics data, private articles or official reports, etc. Moreover, a search option allows finding the necessary information by one word or a word unit in case there is some confusion where to find a publication on this or that topic.
The website contains the strict privacy policy established to protect the private data within www.commonwealthfund.org meaning that there is no engagement of cross-marketing or link-referral programs with other sites. Thus, the users and visitors can be sure that the Fund is not following any marketing purposes so that the private data as email addresses or passwords will not be shared with the third parties. Any kind of abuse noticed on the website should be reported through the contact form or by email. Even though, the Fund has copyright to its works and it no longer uses traditional printing and mailing to produce its publications; all of them are posted on the Fund’s website and are available for everyone free of charge.
One of the latest works can be found in Issue briefs section is How High-Need Patients Experience the Health Care System in Nine Countries” (Sarnak & Ryan, 2016), as well as Serving Older Adults with Complex Care Needs: A New Benefit Option for Medicare (Moon, Hollin, Nicholas, Schoen, & Davis, 2016). Both articles are based on real facts and include publication dates, a list of references, the names of the authors and even their contacts in order to encourage the communication between all members and visitors. Following its Mission Statement, the Fund constantly publishes works related to high-need patients, specificity of care for people in this age and the possible issue which can be faced.
The variety of information offered on the website can be of great benefit for nursing personnel. Thus, the latest updates or news from the healthcare field can be monitored. Moreover, the well-developed multimedia options as podcasts, videos or E-forums give an opportunity to share own thoughts or check what other people think about this or that issue. In addition, the information about programs, grants and fellowships can be interesting for those willing to cooperate with the Commonwealth Fund or just looking for work or practice in healthcare sector. Even though the organization is first of all oriented on the American Health Care System, it still provides statistics data or researches touching the same issues within other world countries. Thus, Country Comparison section allows visiting statistics data taken from different countries on the basis of reports made by the Fund. The ChartCart gives basically the same information just presented in the form of charts and tables.
In spite of the variety of web resources for medical personnel it is not that easy to find the only one which is constantly filled out with the latest updates and is credible at the same time. The creators of http://www.commonwealthfund.org not only adjusted the website to the needs of the Fund members, but also made it available for those who are in search for particular scientific and research information for educational or work purposes. Thus, there are no restrictions for potential visitors and users with free access to all publications unless all private policies are maintained and followed.
References
Commonwealthfund.org. (2016). Mission Statement. Retrieved 20 January 2016, from http://www.commonwealthfund.org/about-us/mission-statement
Moon, Marilyn, Hollin, Ilene L., Nicholas, Lauren Hersch, Schoen, Cathy, Davis, Karen. (2015). Serving Older Adults with Complex Care Needs: A New Benefit Option for Medicare. Retrieved 20 January 2016, from http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/jul/serving-older-adults-complex-care-medicare
Sarnak, Dana O., Ryan, Jamie. (2016). How High-Need Patients Experience the Health Care System in Nine Countries. Retrieved 20 January 2016, from http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2016/jan/high-need-patients-nine-countries
