Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making

The Foundation's mission is to assure that people understand their choices and have the information they need to make sound decisions affecting their health and well being.

The Foundation's objectives:

• Promote understanding and adoption of informed medical decision-making.
• Organize and frame medical evidence in an unbiased manner to help people evaluate their options, particularly in instances where differences in individual preferences and perspectives are likely to affect personal choice.
• Sponsor research to expand knowledge of how to improve decision quality in health care.

In a complex medical environment, where cost savings, commercial interests or professional beliefs and commitments are likely to drive medical decisions, the Foundation provides information that is as objective, complete and unbiased as possible.

The Foundation is a non-profit organization.

Media Doctor Australia

Started in 2004, the Media Doctor project in Australia received more than 25,000 visits in the first year, and continues to attract media attention for its efforts to improve the standards of medical journalism in the mainstream Australian media. Shortly after being launched in 2004, the Media Doctor Australia website was named "Website of the Week" by the British Medical Journal, and in 2005 the site (along with Professor David Henry and Amanda Wilson) was awarded the prestigious Eureka Prize for Critical Thinking. Project leader David Henry is professor of clinical pharmacology, Faculty of Health, University of Newcastle, director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Training in Pharmacology and Rational Drug Use, and course controller of the pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics training program at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Media Doctor Canada

Media Doctor Canada was started in 2005. Project leader Alan Cassels has a master's degree in Public Administration and is currently affiliated with the School of Health Information Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has managed a variety of research and evaluation studies over the past ten years primarily focusing on the impact of provincial drug benefits policies on consumers. He led the first ever evaluation of Canadian newspaper coverage of new drugs (published in April 2003 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal) and has lectured at Canadian journalism schools on issues surrounding pharmaceutical reporting in Canada. He is co-author with Ray Moynihan of Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us all into Patients (Greystone books, 2005).

Further Reading

• Association of Health Care Journalists

  www.healthjournalism.org

• Statement of Principles for Association of Health Care Journalists

  http://www.healthjournalism.org/files/AHCJ_principles.pdf

• Univ. of Minnesota Health Journalism M.A. program

  http://www.healthjournalism.umn.edu

• Hitting the Headlines (UK site)

  http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/hth/help4.asp

• Disease Mongering

  http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Disease_Mongering

• Tipsheet for reporting on drugs, devices and medical technologies

  http://www.cmwf.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=239323

• Cochrane Library

  Cochrane Library

• Therapeutics Initiative/ Therapeutics Letter

  Therapeutics Initiative/ Therapeutics Letter

• Healthy Skepticism

  Healthy Skepticism