Previous research and surveys have found that around 80% of internet users seek health information online and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy models of anxiety related to health concerns and physical symptoms suggest that online searching can exacerbate anxiety.

 

Bauer et al (2014) indicates that up to 20% of women experience mental health problems perinatally and that this also has a significant negative impact on the emotional, physical and cognitive well-being of the child.  Whereas work in this area has tended to focus on postnatal depression, there is now evidence that conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD and psychosis during pregnancy also need to be urgently addressed.

 

Research suggests that a quarter of British women have misdiagnosed and wrongly treated themselves due to information they found on the Internet (The Huffington Post, 2015).

 

65% of women felt that they had been to a website that was wrong or misleading. Most women (94.4 %) felt health care providers should suggest suitable internet sites for pregnancy information in order to reduce their health anxiety (Huberty, Dinkel, Beets & Coleman, 2013).

 

Health anxiety correlated with six measures of possible addiction to using the Internet for health purposes (Singh & Brown, 2014).

 

Internet searches for medical information and health anxiety grew increasingly stronger as intolerance of uncertainty increased (Fergus, 2013)

 

Perinatal educators and other perinatal health-care professionals need to be informed about current online resources to help direct consumers to useful online resources and mitigate the often overwhelming and confusing information (Buultjens, Robinson & Milgrom, 2012).

 

All previous literature stimulates the need for a new tool to help pregnant women, new parents or anyone with general health anxieties. This tool will provide guidelines for medical professionals, patients and the general public, to seek and utilize suitable and reliable internet sources across many different health conditions.