Submitted to the list by E.Cardno, PhD candidate, University of Brighton.
Please contact Dr. Henwood, details at the end, directly for details.


Information, Communication and Society- Special Issue on e-Health
Call for Papers

The area of e-Health is now huge and covers a wide range of socio-technical
innovations in health service delivery and organisation. This Special Issue
will explore just one key area of e-Health- the use of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) in the communication of health
information and advice - both to patients/public and between members of the
public.

Health policy documents in many countries suggest that the greater
availability of health information via the Internet will necessarily lead
to the emergence of more informed patients who are better able to assess
the risks and benefits of different treatments for themselves. The now
widely used notion of ¡¥informed choice¡¦ is indicative of the greater agency
and sense of empowerment said to be experienced by such patients. Such
thinking exists within sociology, too, where, following Giddens¡¦ notion of
the ¡¥reflexive consumer¡¦, there is some support for the idea that the
overall expansion in medical knowledge via new media technologies such as
the Internet will empower patients.

This Special Issue of iCS seeks to explore the assumptions embedded in
this ¡¥informed patient¡¦ discourse through empirically-based papers which
explore the extent and nature of Internet use in a range of settings and
its relationship to patient empowerment and more equitable practitioner-
patient relationships.

Topic areas we hope to cover include:

„h Creation and use of health information websites by both health care
professionals and the public
„h Use of the Internet in consultations between practitioners and patients
„h Online health chat and self-help groups

Key cross-cutting themes we hope to examine include:

„h Access and equality issues
„h Information quality
„h Practitioner-patient relations
„h Information and empowerment

Deadline for submission of papers: Monday 17th November 2003.
Co-editors: Flis Henwood, Brighton University, UK and Ellen Balka, SFU,
Canada.
Please send all submissions to:
Dr Flis Henwood
Social Informatics Research Unit
School of Computing, Mathematical and Information Sciences
University of Brighton, Watts Building, Lewes Road
Brighton BN2 4GJ

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