The amount of health data accessible on the Web is increasing and Internet has become a major source of health information. Many tools and search engines are available but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. In this paper we describe CISMeF-patients. It is a sub part of CISMeF, a structured quality-controlled subject gateway. CISMeF-patients has been designed for the patients, their families and the general public who are often unfamiliar with the medical domain and the medical vocabulary. The resources included in CISMeF patients are described using the Dublin Core metadata format. To index them, CISMeF-patients and CISMeF share the same terminology, which ‘encapsulates’ the MeSH thesaurus with a layer of synonyms. Unlike Medline-plus and Medline, sharing the same terminology allows to a CISMeF patients end-user the possibility to extend his query to the CISMeF catalogue (e.g. for searching teaching resources or clinical guidelines).