This paper presents TerveSuomi.fi, a prototype of a national semantic health portal in Finland. TerveSuomi.fi aggregates ontological metadata created by various Finnish health organizations in a distributed environment. The portal provides a faceted search user interface created from the perspective of ordinary citizens and cross-links documents from multiple sources with recommendations based ...

Vaccination anxieties grew into a public health issue during the 2008 failed measles and rubella immunization campaign in Ukraine. Here I explore how health care providers bend official immunization policies as they navigate media scares about vaccines, parents' anxieties, public health officials' insistence on the need for vaccination, and their own sense of expertise and authority. New hierar...

BACKGROUND The secondary use of health data for research raises complex questions of privacy and governance. Such questions are ill-suited to opinion polling where citizens must choose quickly between multiple-choice answers based on little information. OBJECTIVE The aim of this project was to extend knowledge about what control informed citizens would seek over the use of health records for ...

BACKGROUND The aim of the study was to describe the health-related quality of life of Canarian population using information from the Canary Island Health Survey and three observational studies developed in the Canary Islands. METHODS A descriptive analysis was carried out on a sample of 5.549 Canarian citizens using information from 2004 Canary Island Health Survey and three observational stu...

BACKGROUND The publicly financed health service in Sweden has come under increasing pressure, forcing policy makers to consider restrictions. OBJECTIVE To describe different perceptions of rationing, in particular, what citizens themselves believe influences their acceptance of having to stand aside for others in a public health service. DESIGN Qualitative interviews, analysed by phenomenog...