This section tells you about the PIES project team and the work we are doing. For more details about this website and how you can best use it, go to 'Tour of pies'.
PIES - Personalised Information, Education and Support is a project investigating how the internet can help people with cancer and their carers in obtaining personalised, user friendly and quick access to quality assured information, which is relevant to their individual needs in living with cancer at any stage of illness.
There are many sources used for providing and obtaining information and support relating to cancer, though traditionally we have relied mostly on verbal communication and printed media. Through developments in telecommunications via the World Wide Web, yet another source of information has opened for anyone to access at any time. Previous research from our project has already proved that the internet can be a very useful additional tool - provided people know how and where to look for the resources they need. Even experienced users of computers
and the internet will often need guidance on where to find relevant and reliable information relating to an illness or treatment. The PIES website aims to offer people such assistance.
The website is developed by a team based at the University of Sheffield, UK - within the Sheffield Palliative Care Studies Group in collaboration with School of Nursing and Midwifery. Details of the team are listed below. We are very grateful to Macmillan Cancer Relief who has funded the development and the initial evaluation.
Although the website is freely available on the world wide web, we are particularly evaluating it with users and health professionals within our health region, which is the North Trent Cancer Network. Working with health professionals in Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, Rotherham and Bassetlaw we have established places where people can access the website within health care settings. This provides an opportunity to get assistance in finding information and understanding it, as well as discussing individual issues. People accessing this website from any of these collaborating centres during our evaluation phase will be invited to fill in a questionnaire about using PIES. People accessing the website from home or any other place outside our collaborating centres will have the opportunity to give us their feedback through a quick feedback form or a full size questionnaire placed on the website. As a user, you are the best person to tell us what you like about our website and how it could be made better. We would therefore be very grateful to you if you could spend a few minutes on the feedback section.p>
Project organisation
We have set up two separate groups to advise and oversee the progress of PIES.
PIES Steering Group is acting as the executive body responsible for the completion of PIES. We have also set up a PIES Network Panel, which has a wider membership through the North Trent Cancer Network, to ensure its smooth implementation. The Network Panel consists of a range of health care professionals representing key organisations for cancer patients in our region as well as representatives from the user groups.
Authorship / quality assurance
This website is acting as a portal or gateway to existing information resources and we are not taking the credit as being authors of any of these resources. We are however implementing quality assurance to ensure that the resources we link to are of high quality and relevance to the users of this website. You will find information about this in a different section of the website, under the heading 'quality assurance'.
PIES project team
For full details of address and telephone, please go to contact on the homepage.
Professor Sam H Ahmedzai
Professor of Palliative Medicine
Lead Investigator for PIES
Email: s.ahmedzai@sheffield.ac.uk
Paula M Procter
Reader in Informatics and
Telematics in Nursing
Co-Investigator for PIES
Email: p.procter@sheffield.ac.uk
Hilde Hjelmeland Ahmedzai
PIES Project Manager
Email: h.h.ahmedzai@sheffield.ac.uk
Richard Stevens
Research Associate
Email: r.j.stevens@sheffield.ac.uk
Sue Button
Project Secretary
s.button@sheffield.ac.uk
Sue Knights was a crucial member of our team in developing the PIES website, but she has now moved on to new ventures.
16 January 2007