Sites to which NHS Forth Valley links are outwith the control of NHS Forth Valley and as such no warranties are made for any site which is linked to on NHS Forth Valley. However, we do endeavour to ensure that we only link to high quality Internet information sources. In order to do this we make an effort to ensure that the resources that we link to fulfil the criteria outlined in this policy. Our aim is to promote access to health information that will allow users to play a participative role in their healthcare.
There are four classes of link that are linked to on the NHS Forth Valley website:
NHS Forth Valley will normally provide links to the first three categories of site on request except where the site is in clear breach of good practice or presents information which in the opinion of the NHS Forth Valley website Steering Group is inappropriate or misleading. External websites will be linked to on request which are from organisations that are of sufficient standing for their inclusion to be uncontroversial (e.g. Royal Colleges and the websites of refereed academic journals) and sites on which it is reasonable to assume that there is a QA procedure in place which is at least on a level with the HON Code guidelines. Links may be added to sites which do not meet these criteria at the discretion of the NHS Forth Valley website editorial group or if appropriate the NHS Forth Valley website steering group. Such sites will normally be subject to scrutiny by the Discern instrument to assess their fitness for inclusion.
A weighting scheme will be applied to penalise sites which in the opinion of the NHS Forth Valley editorial team do not meet accessibility criteria. Although such sites may be linked to, their position in listings will be lower than other similar sites which do meet accessibility criteria.