In less than 100 words, what is your idea?:
There is a confusing array of services for someone suddenly faced with a health crisis: primary health care, home help, support groups, social services etc. At the same time, there is a wealth of knowledge among partitioners, carers and patients who could all tell stories on their experiences of the health system. Why not create a web-site to collect this knowledge as a user-generated structured repository in the style of Wikipedia or CNN’s Ireport. By tagging stories and comments, a directory can be maintained with links to people’s stories so that others can find advice on where to get help.
What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?:
There are all manners of community and health services provided by public and private groups. Providers advertise what they do and where they are but this says little about their quality, specialty and how they relate to other services. The average person usually doesn’t think much about these until they are suddenly faced with a serious health problem and then it is hard to get useful advice. These days, people are getting used to putting up stories of their life experiences on the Internet and there are plenty of examples where this works well setting up social networks. My idea would be a facility using the same idea to enable people to enter their stories and have others benefits from them.
What’s really new about your idea?:
This idea combines a real need for useful practical information with the modern practices enabled by technology of citizen journalism, community generated encyclopedias, and virtual communities of interest. A wiki-type system can enable people to enter stories, information etc that can be moderated and tagged so that it is easy and ethical for others to browse and search the repository of knowledge to find information, people with similar interests, answers to questions etc. Why not use this practice which is becoming popular anyway to change the current way information on health service is made available to the public. Get the public involved in making sense of all the currently uncoordinated sources of information combining their experiences so that there is one site where other can go to get help.
Comments
Re: A Publically-generated Story Guide to Community and ...
Spelling - it's publicly, not publically.
Re: A Publically-generated Story Guide to Community and ...
Spelling note - it's publicly.
Re: A Publically-generated Story Guide to Community and ...
Hi, I think the trick here is a combination of how you might aggregate exisitng information on the web in a useful way with user generated stories and information in a community that you build. I know they're looking at this type of approach in the UK in health so keep track of some of the developments there. See for example
www.patientopinion.org.uk/ which lets patients share experiences of the health system and http://launchpad.youngfoundation.org/node/217 which was an abortive attempt at soem of this. Also http://www.patientsknowbest.com/about-us.html is not really related but an interesting spin on how ot out patients in control of their care.
Re: A Publically-generated Story Guide to Community and ...
I agree that a service where one can find information about the range of services provided around say aged care or disability or whatever would be enormously useful for those faced with such life changing events.
I would support this wholeheartedly.