About the Health A-Z Section

What is the Health A-Z section?

The Health A-Z section is a database that helps women find useful and reliable health resources to support their health-care decision-making. You can search this database in English or French using a variety of criteria to retrieve results that contain standardized descriptions of resources reviewed by Women's Health Matters staff.

The Health A-Z section contains:

• short articles we have written on a wide variety of women’s health topics; and
• detailed descriptions of books and periodicals, audiovisual and multimedia materials and websites

The resources are categorized in many ways, enabling you to search specifically for author or organization, title, descriptive keywords, type of resource, intended audience or target group, geographic origin, language of the resource and topic.

Use this database as an access point to women's health resources in English, French and other languages. We focus on information from Ontario and the rest of Canada, but our collection also includes information from around the world.

What kind of information is in the Health A-Z section

Priority is given to resources that:

• Provide reliable and accurate women's health information
• Provide support to women who are coping with a specific illness or condition
• Help women become more educated health information consumers
• Help women navigate the Canadian health-care system

How does Women's Health Matters decide what to include in the Health A-Z section?

For our external resources, the Women's Health Matters team uses a detailed Collection Development Policy to select resources, and also to decide what to exclude.

In general, we give higher priority to resources from non-profit groups and government agencies than we do to resources produced by private companies. Resources authored by pharmaceutical companies are excluded, but resources sponsored by such companies and independently written may be included. Resources produced by individuals are examined for reliability, and all resources are examined for bias against women and against specific ability and ethnocultural groups.

This policy may change as circumstances warrant.

To learn more about the Collection Development policy, e-mail your question to resources@womenshealthmatters.ca

How often is the Health A-Z section updated?

The database is live on the Internet, and is updated frequently. We add new resources and delete those that are no longer relevant. We find new external resources both by actively searching for them and by recommendations from the community.

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