About Public healthy

General

Public Healthy was set up in June 2005 and is designed and written by Dr Tom Porter.  It is an independent, non-profit website I run in my spare time.  A sitemap is available here.   

The information on this site is intended for health professionals.  If you are a member of the public or a patient and have any queries about specific health problems you are advised to see your General Practitioner or call NHS Direct on 0845 46 47 (UK only).

Mission statement

Public healthy is designed to give public health professionals in the UK the information they need to do their everyday job.  Although there is a wealth of information available on the internet to support day-to-day PH, this is in general poorly organised and held in multiple places.  Public healthy aims to make it easier to find this knowledge - let me know how I'm doing!

When I started Public healthy in 2005 the original purpose was to introduce people to public health and the training scheme.  At the time of writing I have recently 'graduated' from the training scheme, and not only does the FPH site now carry much more general information on PH training, but I feel less qualified to talk about the training which has altered significantly since I started, and will inevitably continue to evolve. 

Therefore although the site still carries information on public health training, this is no longer the sole focus of Public healthy, and I've added new sections on recommended books, and a directory. The plan now is to expand the articles section on the site, for which I'm keen to get readers' help - please get in touch if you think you could contribute.

Contact us / Feedback

We hope you enjoy using this website.  If you have any comments or criticisms please let me know.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my amazing wife Fleur for her continuing encouragement and support for the site.

Privacy policy

Public healthy is an independent website owned solely by the author.  Any personal information submitted to the site is used only for the purpose of responding to the query. You will not receive any unsolicited emails.  We may occasionally quote some text from a comment you have submitted but this will always be anonymous. Please state in your submission if you do not wish this to happen.

If you submit a non-commissioned article to Public healthy you will retain copyright on the article prior to any publication. Should the article be published (in which instance you would be notified beforehand), copyright will rest jointly between the author and Public healthy, and you will be appropriately credited on the page.

In common with most websites certain information is automatically available to us when you use your web browser to access Public healthy.  This includes what type of web browser you are using, your IP (internet protocol) address and what operating system your computer runs on.  No personal information is taken from the computer you are using.

Clicking on the 'Email' link on the top menu activates your local email client; no information on email addresses or content is passed to us.  Public healthy does not use pop-up windows.

All articles are referenced wherever possible.  Any information not referenced is the author's opinion.  If you think the source of any information on the site has been incorrectly attributed please let me know.

If you think this policy has been violated please let me know immediately.

HONcode accreditation

Public healthy is accredited by the Health-on-the-Net (HON) Foundation which seeks to ensure quality amongst medical and health websites.

HONcode rules of conduct | Verify this site

Viewing PDF files

To read some documents on this site you will need a PDF reader, such as that provided free by Adobe.  Click here to download Adobe Reader.  PDFs were created for the site using the free Primo PDF creator and PDF Online.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)

DOI is a way of referencing journal papers.  The advantage over the traditional author journal volume: pages method is that it can be used for the increasingly common 'online first' or 'e-publication ahead of print' documents which are otherwise difficult to reference.  Because the system is relatively new, not all publishers use it yet and there is sometimes a delay in the link becoming 'live'.  However it is likely that this or an equivalent system will predominate in the near future.

To maintain constancy of links to papers (and other internet content) an independent database holds the latest URL for the particular content.  Typing the DOI reference (e.g. 10.1126/science.1121586) into the DOI page will automatically forward you to the content, no matter where it is stored on the internet.

Public healthy automatically forwards you via the DOI system to the correct URL when a DOI is given in the reference.

More information on DOI  (International DOI Foundation, January 2006)

Copyright

Unless otherwise specified, all information on Public healthy is original and written by Dr Tom Porter.  Public healthy is copyright © T Porter . 

Legal

Errors and omissions excepted.  All information on Public healthy is provided to the best of my knowledge but should not be solely relied upon in critical decision-making, and Public healthy cannot accept responsibility for any actions taken as a result of information presented here.  Trademarks are the property of their respective owners.  Public healthy is not responsible for the content of external websites.  If you believe any sites are linked to in error or your site is linked to and you would like the link removed, please contact me.  Please feel free to link to Public healthy.   

Funding

Public healthy is written and updated in the author's spare time, with no financial gain.  In order to pay the small costs for the web server, a tiny amount of money is generated through referral fees from links on the book pages, with the rest being met by the author.  Please note these referral fees do not alter the cost of books purchased, but if you'd prefer to pocket them yourself you could do worse than sign up for a site like Quidco, or if you'd like to give it to charity use something like everyclick to search the web.  Public healthy does not carry any paid advertisements.

Technical

This site was created in Microsoft Expression Web using hand-coded CSS, HTML and Javascript, and tested for compatibility with IE6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3.5, Opera, Chrome and Safari 4. If you have any problems viewing Public healthy please contact me.  Not sure what browser to use?  I'd recommend Firefox, and please please please upgrade from IE6 if you're still using it - it's rubbish!  Pages are compliant with XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0.

Accessibility

Public Healthy is designed to be available to as many people as possible.  All pages have the option for high contrast text (click the larger 'A' in the toolbar at the top of the screen), and pages are designed using CSS which should aid visitors with screenreaders. All common web browsers allow you to increase the size of the text visible on the page.