An evaluation of the content and quality of tinnitus information on websites preferred by General Practitioners

Table 5 DISCERN Questionnaire scores

Website	Used by% GPs	Section 1 score	Section 2 score	Overall score	Kendall's coefficient of concordance
Map of Medicine	2	4.6	2.3	3.5	Wt = 0.85, df = 2, p = 0.001
BTA	2	3.3	3.1	3.2	Wt = 0.67, df = 2, p = 0.014
GP notebook	52	3.5	2.4	3.1	Wt = 0.84, df = 2, p = 0.001
eMedicine	1	3.6	2.6	3.1	Wt = 0.45, df = 2, p = 0.002
CKS	7	3.9	1.9	2.9	Wt = 0.84, df = 2, p = 0.001
Mentor-online	15	3.9	1.6	2.8	Wt = 0.82, df = 2, p = 0.002
GP online	<1	3.4	2.1	2.8	Wt = 0.76, df = 2, p = 0.004
Action on Hearing Loss	2	2.8	2.6	2.7	Wt = 0.79, df = 2, p = 0.003
Patient.co.uk	19	4.0	1.6	2.6	Wt = 0.92, df = 2, p < 0.001
NHS Choices	<1	2.8	2.0	2.5	Wt = 0.75, df = 2, p = 0.005

Section1, Section 2 and Overall score for each website are presented as mean of all questions (8 questions in Section 1, 7 questions in Section 2, 15 questions overall). Values are averages corrected to one decimal place. Websites are listed in rank order of overall score. Scores can range 0 to 5 where a score less than 5 suggests some ‘potentially important but not serious shortcomings’ and a score of less than 3 suggests some ‘potentially serious shortcomings’ in the information. BTA = British Tinnitus Association, CKS Clinical Knowledge Summaries. Inter-rater reliability is reported as Kendall’s Wt. ‘Used by% GPs’ refers to the proportional use of each website by GPs in our previous study [6].

ISSN: 1472-6947