Hi all
As many of you will be aware, NRAS achieved certification from the Information Standard in January of this year. What you may not be aware of is all the work going on behind the scenes in our helpline department at the moment, in order to ensure that all of our publications are meeting the requirements of this scheme and can display the Information Standard logo. This is a slow process and is vital, as there will come a point where we will not be allowed to use any health and social care documents which have not gone through this process.
One of the key requirements for meeting these targets is that all of our articles will need to be reader-reviewed. I have a lovely team of 20 reader-reviewers, recruited from our volunteers across the country who are currently helping me with this already, but I have to send each article to 5 readers at a time, and as I don't want to overload busy people with too many reviews to do, this can slow the process down.
If any of you would be interested in becoming a reader-reviewer, please do get in touch. You can email me at:
vicky@nras.org.ukHere are some more details about what this entails:
- You would be sent 2 articles at a time to review
- These are sent rougly once per month
- With the article I send a questionnaire to fill in, which includes a free-text box for any other feedback you may have
- I am more than happy for you to say no if I send you articles at an inconvenient time
- Once I have had the full feedback from the 5 reviewers and changes have been made to the article I will email you a summary of the comments that were made and the changes we made based on those comments so that you can see the difference this has made (sometimes this can take a while to come through, if there are a lot of changes or we need to run them by the author)
- The reader reviews conducted so far have made a HUGE difference to the quality of our publications, so you will be able to make a real difference to the information available to people with RA.
-The purpose of the reader review is to make sure that we are covering the information you expect to see in each article, and in a way that is patient-friendly and does not have too much medical jargon! A peer reviewer will also look at the article to check for accuracy, so you won't need to. Any typos you spot will also be appreciated, particularly by me, as this is a pet hate of mine!
So, if you like reading, feel that you would be good at critically reviewing information, and can spare your time roughly once a month to review a couple of articles for us, we would love to add you to our reader-review team.
I hope to hear from some of you soon!
Many thanks
Victoria
vicky@nras.org.uk