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Draft Guide to the Production and Provision of Information about Health and Healthcare Interventions
Section 8 - Post-distribution reviewing and updating of information materials
Knowledge about health and healthcare is not static, and even the best information will not remain accurate for ever. As time goes on, our understanding of the causes and mechanisms of diseases improves, new treatments are developed, more research is conducted, judgements change, and there are shifts in health policy and clinical practice.
The information given to health service users needs to be reviewed and either updated or withdrawn if it becomes outdated. There are no hard-and-fast rules about how regularly information should be reviewed. Materials covering areas where treatments are developing rapidly or where research is ongoing will need to be reviewed more often than those where developments are less active.
If you are responsible for health information materials on particular topics, you may want to devise a strategy to ensure that you find out about any important developments or new research evidence. This might include regular searches of relevant sources of research-based information. You might also try, at periodic intervals (perhaps annually), to check with relevant subject experts that information is up-to-date, and with healthcare professionals and members of the intended audience that the package is useful. You might consider providing contact details with your information package to encourage people to contact you if they think that anything is inaccurate or out-of-date.
Sometimes, new information or changes in policy and practice will make the content of your materials less than ideal, though unlikely to be harmful. If this is the case, you might decide to amend your package at the next reprinting or production run (and you may forward the reprinting or reproduction date). At other times, however, new information or changes in practice could make the information seriously misleading or possibly harmful. In this case, the materials should be withdrawn and, if possible, revised. You may need to contact all distributors, and the organisations that maintain databases of information materials to ensure that it is removed from circulation as soon as possible.
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