I am author co-ordinator for Oxford Clinical Mentor. We are currently
coming to the end of a round of updating and are looking at how we can
continue to keep both the stand-alone Windows 3.1 and win9x and EMIS
text versions up-to-date.

BRAIN STORMING SESSION PLEASE

I would very much value comments on any of the following:

There are currently 35+ chapters of mentor. We have a small (<10)
dedicated team of authors and GP reviewers, but it is a major task to
keep the updates flowing. The text is based on the Oxford handbook
series, but mentor builds on this, adding extras which are needed for
general practice and other "primary care" users. It is never meant to
replace major texts such as Oxford Textbook of Medicine (too much detail
hides the important bits and is as bad as not enough!)- but links to
them and WWW resources, dermis, pils, BNF and perhaps more, and has
"further reading" and references list. 

The current pricing policy (EMIS -free, Windows version UKP99
standalone, network version ?UKP500) means that once the development
costs are paid there is very little in the kitty to pay authors. 

One suggestion:

I wondered the feasability of having many many authors, each with a
small area of responsibility (eg Diabetes, pituitary problems, uppper
GI, lower GI, medical ethics, legal matters etc etc). These authors
would be expected to provide several updates a year and keep their
section up-to-date in return for ongoing free mentor (multimedia)
updates/subscriptions for their practices? They also need to be USERS of
mentor so they can feedback any areas where mentor "comes up short" and
either suggest areas where the text needs expanding, or author the
update themselves if sufficiently motivated.

Their output would need to be referenced and peer reviewed by a much
smaller group of reviewers as already exists (salaried but i'm afraid
only likely to be small 4 figure sums annually), regularly working about
an evening a week. this group may need expanding depending on how things
go.

The authoring could only really be a hobby, but a lot of us regularly
research for GP tutorials etc, and mentor articles are only meant to be
an "in the consultation" guide, with links to OTM etc. Is it not a shame
that all the reading we all do goes to waste?

Would anyone be interested (and altruistic enough) to help? It is not
difficult work - and is really a very good way of keeping up-to-date!


Kind regards

Huw Thomas
[log in to unmask] 

ps - REMEMBER _ PLEASE USE MENTOR - and all you mentor users PLEASE KEEP
THE FEEDBACK COMING. you can E mail me with any suggested improvements -
or use the existing feedback system.
-- 
Huw Thomas
-- 
Huw Thomas


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