Choosing Wisely Australia has a range of resources to help you work out what information you need and what questions to ask before you agree to any tests or treatments.  They also have some tips for communicating with your health care provider.

A free online tool to help you think about questions you might like to ask your doctor, and to prepare for any questions they may ask you when you go to an appointment.  The tool was developed for Australian consumers by healthdirect Australia and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.

CID has easy read health information about things like:

• Recording your health information
• Understanding your medication
• Finding a new doctor.

HCCA has translates resources into easy read on staying safe in hospital and complaints in the ACT Health Care system.

A guide produced by The Centre for Research and Evidence Based Practice at Bond University gives some useful tips on identifying bogus health claims and assessing the value of health claims made in the media or online.

Healthy Horizons is a website for women from refugee and migrant backgrounds developed by Harmony Alliance and RANZCOG. It has easy, in-language, video and text information on a variety of issues. The topics include contraception, sexual health, mental health, skin health, breast cancer, rare diseases, and more. You can also read the site in Arabic or Simplified Chinese.

Pathology Tests Explained offers unbiased education and information about pathology tests. It includes what test might be used for a conditions, how the tests are done and how to understand the results. You can search their website by the name of a test or condition or even the acronyms from your test form.

A fact sheet from the Good Things Foundation provides some basic tips to help find good sources of information on the internet.

The European Food Information Council, EUFIC, is a non-profit organisation that provides easy to understand science-based information. They produce a range of resources for consumers to help them find and understand health information.  Including: finding reliable information online, understanding scientific studies, understanding risk, the difference between correlation and causation.

A free online tool for assessing the value of information.  It asks three basic questions: Who said it? When did they say it? How did they know?

This Guide, developed by Dr Rachel Skoss at Notre Dame University, is for anyone supporting a person with intellectual disability or a person who needs support to understand and navigate the health system. It is a guide to health literacy which includes practical information and links to resources to build the person’s knowledge and skills in managing their own health and support them to navigate the health system.

Published by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC).

An initiative of the Victorian Government. They provide health professionals and community members with reliable, accurate, and up to date health and wellbeing information in over 100 languages. The website provides a link to multilingual resources published by government departments, peak health bodies, hospitals, and community health and welfare organisations.

Northern NSW Health Literacy is a good source of information on health literacy and has a range of tools for consumers to help build their health literacy skills.  Their PLAN handout is a helpful tool for patients to get the most from a health care appointment.  It give suggestions for how to prepare, what information you might need, some questions to ask, and room to write down some of the answers.

Produced by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), First do no harm: A guide to choosing wisely in general practice is a resource focused on reducing patient harms and avoiding low-value care. This online, ‘living’ resource will provide both general practitioners (GPs) and patients with information on:

• overused tests
• overdiagnosed and overtreated conditions
• interventions with insufficient evidence.

Importantly, First do no harm is designed to enable positive and constructive conversations between GPs and patients, providing information and tools to assist in shared decision making. First do no harm will help empower patients to make informed and balanced decisions about their health, including information they should consider asking their GP.

This tool could help you work your way through a difficult decision.  It can help you collect information and clarify your thoughts about an important decision.

The NPS MedicineWise website has a range of helpful information on managing your medications.  Good medicine management can help you to get the most benefit from your medicines and reduce your chances of mishaps that can cause side effects or harmful interactions.  One of the tools they have developed is the MedicineWise app for smart phones.  The MedicineWise app will help you keep track of your medicines and access important health info anytime and anywhere, especially in emergencies.

A good summary of how to understand health risks produced by the National Institute of Health in the United States.

A summary produced by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in the United Kingdom.