Internet sites for nursing home professionals.

When it comes to the Internet, it's surf or sink - and it s all too easy to sink. There are more Internet sites than anyone could ever visit in a reasonable lifetime, and the amount of information they contain can be overwhelming. For most users Internet access means the World Wide Web. My guess is that if you're a Web user and a nursing home professional, you have probably performed a key word search on terms such as nursing homes, long-term care, geriatrics, health care, and nursing. After some waiting time, you find your screen describing ten or so sites, and offering to let you scroll through (literally) 10,000 more. I would further guess that you just don't have the time.

Maybe you will look at 30 or 40 of the listings and give up. In my case, if feeling particularly adventuresome, I jump to a few sites until I find one that holds my interest, which then refers me to another site that looks intriguing, which then suggests five more home pages, and I am off on a journey of exploration that lasts for hours. When reality intrudes, I find that I am a million miles - or is it gigabytes? - from where I started, having had a lot of fun, but unsure if I have learned anything that will be of use to me today, tomorrow or ever.

If you stay at it, though, as I did recently, you will every once in a while come across a site worth keeping and sharing. What follows are a few sites on the Internet I have visited recently which may be of interest to nursing home professionals. These are not necessarily the best sites, just ones that have intrigued me. As always with Internet sites, the addresses may have changed by the time you read this. So, if you can't reach a specific site, try "truncating the URL" (Uniform Resource Locator). For example, if you were unable to reach http://www.prnewswire.com/in/newshealthcare.html, try http://www.prnewswire.com/in/instead.

Still with me? Then let's start with http://www.prnewswire.com/in/newshealthcare.html, the "Biotechnology and Healthcare News" home page of PR Newswire. It carries press releases from companies grouped under three headings: biotechnology and pharmaceutical news, health care and medical product news, and health related news. In addition it lists publication, association, and corporate links and a calendar of events. PR Newswire is headquartered in New York City and specializes in electronically distributing press releases to the media and financial communities. Long-term care business news is one of its staples.

http://keydet.sra.com/1stbin/read_level/First/ is another business news-oriented site. It carries a daily listing and the text of articles culled from the media relating to the health care industry. The page shows nine headings: executive summary, pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology industry, medical device industry, medical services, health economics, regulatory topics, clinical areas, general health care topics. Clicking on medical services will take you to another page with a listing of 11 topics - of which long-term care is one. Click on long-term care and you will be able to read that day's articles pertaining to the industry.

http://www.slu.edu/departments/medicine/as/index.html takes you to Aging Successfully, a newsletter of the Division of Geriatric Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. This is just one of a number of newsletters you are likely to find online from medical schools and others with an interest in topics pertaining to nursing homes. A recent issue included a report on a study which found that the majority of nursing home residents have a good quality of life.

gopher://post.its.mcw.edu:72/ is the Center for the Study of Bioethics of the Medical College of Wisconsin's online service. It has a wide variety of articles, news, bulletins, electronic publishings, databases and listings of other bioethics sources. For anyone interested in bioethics and current discussions of the subject - a major concern in long-term care - this is an ideal source.

http://www.ice.net/~kstevens/ELDERWEB.HTM is an example of a home page oriented to the elderly and their families in need of health care. There are many such sites on the Web, and they vary greatly in the information they contain. This site includes a provider locator; covers law and legislation, living arrangements, statistics on the elderly and state-specific information; and recommends links to other Web sites. This site's "webmaster," Karen Stevenson Brown, is a CPA with a background in nursing home management.

There you have it - five Internet locations I have found to be of interest to long-term care professionals. They are the results of hours of hunting and sorting through the good, the bad and the ugly. Maybe you have had the same experience (i.e. arduous, but successful). If so, why not share your finds? Send me the good Internet sites you have found (and forget the bad and the ugly), include a little description of the site, and in a future issue I'll share them with other Nursing Homes readers. You can send them to me by "snail mail" (sorry, U.S. Postal Service), c/o the magazine, or e-mail me at [e-mail]. Your surfing colleagues will be most grateful, I'm sure.