Introduction A medical gateway is a subject based web site which includes links to other web sites on the same subject. The most useful gateways appraise information available and only include the best web sites with summaries and recommendations There are a growing number of Web sites which provide gateways to healthcare resources. Their selection policies differ as does the scope of the resources listed. Some of them are developed by librarians and some by health care professionals and also have different target audiences.
Some sites offer e-mail responses to users' questions.
Six such gateways are discussed below. Initially it would be useful to check OMNI which allows you to choose to search only UK resources and which is rated highly for content and then investigate some of the other sites depending on the nature of the query. These are catalogued by librarians and can be searched by alphabetical topic in classified order and by keyword using MeSH headings. Comprehensive help and searching hints are available. Resources are divided in two categories - UK and World and these can be searched together or separately.