NHS Behind the Headlines

Another repackaged hack, this time, one I did at a Rewired State event.

I’ve been a big fan of the Behind the Headlines (BtH) blog that the NHS produce. They do something seemingly beyond our media organisations’ abilities. Namely, they link to science, evaluate it and avoid making shit up for the sake of a scare-worthy headline and its accompanying ‘share-this-link’ traffic.

It’s a bit of a pain, when faced with a health news story to go to the BtH blog, search for it, find the truth, etc. Too many clicks. What you really want is the NHS BtH blog post right there while you’re reading the churnalism.

Luckily, if you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, I’ve fixed that for you. Here’s a Behind the Headlines Chrome Extension that puts a little skull xray button in your address bar on stories that BtH has covered.

When you’re browsing a health story (maybe like this one) or a science paper (how about this one?), click the button and see what NHS BtH has said about said article or paper. Easy. It looks like this:

Behind the scenes, there’s a server running on Google Appengine that every couple of hours, scrapes the BtH blog for new articles. See github for source of both the server and the browser extension.

You can install the extension from this link

It’s been written, just sitting there, for over a year, and I’m sorry I haven’t released this before now – the NHS Choices people said they were going to pay me for it, and that dragged on and on for months, and then nothing. Not even an email to say no, thank-you. Well, there we go, I suppose. I wonder how many other open-data type projects lose momentum when someone official feigns interest but doesn’t have the authority to make stuff actually happen.