All about TravelHealthPro
Travel health can be complicated, and advice for health professionals and travellers is ever-changing. In this regular feature, Jane Chiodini seeks out and presents the latest travel advice and information to help you keep your practice up to date. She also revisits areas of on-going concern, for spot checks and further clarification
The NaTHNaC website has been completely redesigned not only with a fresh and beautifully illustrated look, but with a dynamically different interface. This website is now online with the new web address of http://travelhealthpro.org.uk/
Go into a country specific page and you will now see information specific to the country including a weather widget to provide the current temperature, a direct link to that country specific advice from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a Google map window which if you click within, will take you to the country itself for further research. All these features will save the user significant time. Vaccine recommendations are now more directional in helping you to decide for ‘most travellers’ and ‘some travellers’ after performing your travel risk assessment. For countries with a yellow fever recommendation, the maps now provided are from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as opposed to the two previously used World Health Organization maps. The CDC maps contain greater detail and highlight tourist destinations (e.g. Iguacu Falls in Brazil, popular tourist areas in Kenya).
Further welcome maps are those for antimalarial recommendations. These fall in line with the advice given in the Guidelines for malaria prevention in travellers from the UK from Public Health England and the ones currently available are for India, South Africa and Sudan with – hopefully – more to come in due course.
Another new feature is a tag cloud which is found in the bottom right position on many of the main menu pages. This is a visual representation of single words with the importance of each tag shown in font size or colour. This format is used for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms. If you click on one, it will hyperlink you to an item on that topic. For example, try clicking on VFR – this will take you to a leaflet from Public Health England for those planning to travel overseas to visit friends and relatives (VFRs).
The ‘Latest News’ section is a good way to keep up to date. Fully illustrated and with a headline of what’s new, go to the entry, for example, for 13 August 2015, which states: ‘The marketing authority for Ixiaro® Japanese encephalitis vaccine has changed to include an accelerated schedule. Adults 18-65 years of age can be vaccinated as follows: first dose at day 0, second dose, 7 days after the first dose. Primary immunisation should be completed at least one week prior to potential exposure to Japanese encephalitis virus.’ The article then links the reader to the Ixiaro Summary of Product Characteristics on the Electronic Medicines Compendium online.
The World Overview is another brand new feature which illustrates a world map with coloured pins inserted in countries where there have been disease outbreaks (orange pin) and latest news items (blue pin). Click on the individual pin and the story will pop up. Use the magnification bar to the left of the map to enlarge areas where there may be a number of pins in close proximity to each other. You can also select the information by topic by a series of icons at the bottom of the page. For example, hover over the small paw print and a heading of ‘Animal’ appears. Click on this and the map changes with, at the time of writing, only two pins illustrating outbreak surveillance information about rabies in the US, and in French Guiana.
TravelHealthPro has been redesigned to provide information to travellers and healthcare professionals from just one site and I feel this has been achieved very successfully. Much of the operational information we require in travel health can be found in ‘Quick links’ at the bottom of the website which will take you to a wealth of important and useful information. The use of this fresh new website and social media links may well appeal to and attract the travelling public, thereby protecting their health – which has always been our end goal.