2015 APHA Annual Meeting & Expo

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Recorded Annual Meeting Presentations (RAMP) are now available for purchase.
Only $90 for presenters, $140 for registered attendees and $200 for non-attendees.

Online Program

318550
McMaster Optimal Aging Portal: Putting easy-to-understand, evidence-based information on healthy aging right in your hands


Monday, November 2, 2015

Maureen Dobbins, RN, PhD, McMaster University, National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools, Hamilton, ON, Canada
Susannah Watson, MA - Health Promotion, McMaster University, Health Evidence, Hamilton, ON, Canada
There is a lot of health information freely available on the internet relevant to “optimal aging” (staying healthy, active and engaged as we grow older) but it is often difficult to know which messages we can trust. The McMaster Optimal Aging Portal is a website dedicated to increasing public accessibility to the best available scientific evidence about optimal aging and common health conditions.  Funded by the Labarge Optimal Aging Initiative, the site was launched in October, 2014.

Content is drawn from three best-in-class resources: Health Evidence (an online registry of quality-appraised systematic reviews evaluating public health interventions); Health Systems Evidence (an online registry of evidence on how to strengthen or reform health systems); and MacPlus (a database of best evidence to support clinical decisions).  Users can access abstracts and summaries of scientific evidence and link to the full-text articles, find the best aging-related health resources available online, and read expert commentaries about popular aging topics. @Mac_AgingNews helps you stay up to date on aging news hitting the headlines and research evidence on that topic; email alerts deliver tailored content right to your inbox. Star-ratings help users skim through masses of health research and easily identify the highest quality resources they need to make evidence-based decisions around optimal aging. 

The McMaster Optimal Aging Portal gives public health researchers, professionals and policy makers direct access to trusted, evidence-based information about optimal aging to help their communities remain healthy, active and engaged as long as possible.

Learning Areas:

Chronic disease management and prevention
Communication and informatics
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Identify the highest-quality, most trustworthy and reliable information about healthy aging Demonstrate skills to search for this information on the McMaster Optimal Aging Portal and put it into practice

Keyword(s): Aging, Practice-Based Research

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Maureen Dobbins, RN PhD, is the Scientific Director of Health Evidence (http://www.healthevidence.org). As a professor in the School of Nursing at McMaster University, her research focuses on knowledge translation (KT) among public health decision makers in Canada, including identified needs, barriers and facilitators affecting evidence use, and effective KT strategies. In addition to her role with HE, she is also the Scientific Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 3323.0: Translating Aging Research into Practice