Knowledge defeats fear, googling your symptoms doesn’t. Therefore, we decided to break down complicated diagnoses, explain conditions, and illustrate comorbidities so that everyone understands them. We invite you to visit The Waiting Room, where easy to understand medical knowledge is available. Patients, supporters, and readers that are generally interested in health information are the target audience of this blog.

This week, we celebrate our blog’s one-year anniversary. On April 14, 2021, we, the Patient Resources & Products unit, launched this new resource. After seemingly endless brainstorming sessions, a dozen concepts, and countless ideas, “a collection of health information for the general public” came to life and has been thriving ever since.

Karger has been an expert in scientific and medical publishing but translating this content to patients is quite new. In 2019, we started expanding into new business areas and increasingly offering innovative services for every step of the research cycle. We started to adapt medical research outcomes to an audience of non-researchers and developed new products and services especially for patients and clinicians. The Waiting Room perfectly fits in our new portfolio.

Our priority has always been to establish a trustworthy resource of medical knowledge. Our aim is to deliver accurate, reliable, and easy-to-understand information about health issues in a broad set of areas. Our content is divided into the following sections:

Knowledge Transfer

The posts in this section are based on recently published content found in scientific journals. We cooperate with medical journalists who select relevant articles or chapters from Karger’s publication portfolio and explain the scientific findings and their possible impact on patients in plain language.

Tell Me About …

When browsing through our portfolio we often come across content that is relevant for patients, e.g. individual chapters of Fast Facts or snippets and recipes from our publication “Kinderernährung”. We love to make our findings available on our blog and refer to the original resource.

Interviews

The backbone of this section is our editorial calendar, where we collect worldwide health awareness dates. We then ask experts in their respective fields and/or patient organizations and advocates to explain certain conditions, thus helping to raise awareness for certain topics.

Ideas for the Future

When we started, we conducted interviews in written form only. Meanwhile we always offer our interviewees the choice between a written or a video interview. Video interviews are published on Karger’s YouTube channel and then also embedded in a blog post on “The Waiting Room”.

Podcasts are the next new product being developed.

We already have a pilot with one of our scientific journals on “Plain Language Summaries”. Once they are available, they will be published on the blog as well.

After one year of “The Waiting Room”, we are proud of what we have achieved, and look forward to further sessions of brainstorming, working out concepts, and developing ideas to improve the blog further and keep it alive and kicking.

Interested in visiting our Waiting Room? Find out more about where and how we can cut down on sugar, how you can boost your immune system, about benefits and risk of hormone replacement therapy, and much more.

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