Reference Reviews

Doug's Student Reference Room

Title: Health and Wellness Resource Center
Publisher: Gale
URL: http://www.galegroup.com/Health/HealthRC/about.htm
Evaluated: April, 2008

Health resources are important components of a school library, providing support for curriculum and for students’ own physical and emotional health. Gale’s Health and Wellness Resource Center offers a one-stop center for information on a wide range of health-related topics. The latest interface is more streamlined and graphics-rich than many of Gale’s other Resource Center products. Tabs allow entry into the content via diseases and conditions; drugs; a medical and health information directory; a medical dictionary; links to government and major medical sites; and links to sites on healthy living, diet and cancer support. The homepage is divided into sections for searching most of the topics from the tabs, in addition to exploring featured content from “Topics in the News” and “Health Highlights.”

Opening searches in the “Diseases and Conditions” section offer results only from the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, entries from which nevertheless provide a substantial overview of topics and include a bibliography of books, periodicals, and direct links to related Web sites. The left sidebar of each content page includes “See Also” terms that link to the Resource Center’s other content, which include UXL’s Body by Design; Gale’s Encyclopedia of Cancer, Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders, and Encyclopedia of Childhood & Adolescence; over fifty Harvard Special Health Reports; Mosby's Medical, Nursing, and Allied Health Dictionary; the PDR Family Guide to Over-the-Counter Drugs, and more. Content is also pulled from over 1,300 periodical publications and over 300 pamphlets from government and medical institutions. A limited number of ready-reference sources are available in Spanish that would allow for basic research.

When using the general search on the homepage, results are separated under six tabs: books & fact sheets, magazines & journals, drugs, pamphlets, video, and news. Teachers and librarians will appreciate the inclusion of UXL titles and other overview materials and pamphlets with reading levels as low as the sixth grade, making this database useful for middle school and low readers.

The “magazines & journals” results are organized chronologically and continually updated. This section would benefit from an ability to organize by relevance and to sort by journal or popular magazine. Results from a search on “marijuana” included these consecutive entries: from Psychopharmacology, an article entitled “Cerebral glucose metabolism and D.sub.2/D.sub.3 receptor availability in young adults with cannabis dependence measured with positron emission tomography,” followed by an article from Family Circle, “Ask Dr. Ron (what to do when your kid is smoking pot).” Sorting by periodical type would help searchers target the kind of information they are seeking.

A strength of the database is its collection of 700 health-related videos. These clips, typically under five minutes, would be a valuable resource to classroom teachers introducing or providing extensions on a topic. Transcripts of each video are provided for use in research reports. Also useful is the “Trusted Sites” section, a collection of medical and health links to government sites such as Medline Plus and the Center for Disease Control, and major medical organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association. The “Health Assessment” section, while limited, offers links to sites that offer risk assessment tools for everything from asthma to osteoporosis, including tools for teens to measure the risks associated with marijuana, alcohol, and sexual behaviors.

Overall, this database offers valuable health information to a wide range of users from middle school and above. Recommended for secondary school and public libraries.

—Doug Achterman