Nurses and Midwives are you tired of the gymnastics you have to perform to find the information you need for your work or study?
The Knowledge and Library Service has dedicated the month of April 2009 to training nurses and midwives on searching the healthcare databases. Sessions last for 1 hour, are in small groups of 6 maximum and will show you how to search for journal article references and full text where this is available.
You will need a current NHS Athens username and password. You can self-register for this at http://www.library.nhs.uk/
When you have registered you will need to answer the email you are sent in order to activate your account. If you already have a username and password but are unsure of the details, please contact the library asap as we will not have time to sort out problems during the training.
The April dates and times are as follows:
1st, 2nd & 3rd at 12 – 1pm
7th & 9th at 2 – 3pm
14th, 15th & 16th at 12 – 1pm
21st, 22nd & 24th at 2 – 3pm
27th & 28th at 2 – 3pm
Please contact the library to reserve a place or turn up on the day for any spare places.
We are happy to organise group sessions outside of these times. Please contact the library if your group would like to do this.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Nurses / Midwives - April is for YOU
Monday, 23 March 2009
Best Practice on trial
The Knowledge & Library Service is continuing to look into different solutions for providing rapid access resources to support clinical care. In recent times we have trialled both UpToDate and promoted the Dynamed resources available as part of the National Library for Health. A new option is Best Practice from the BMJ Publishing Group.
"In a single source we have combined the latest research evidence, guidelines and expert opinion – presented in a step-by-step approach, covering prevention, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Best Practice provides a second opinion in an instant, without the need for checking multiple resources. Its unique patient-focused approach represents a major new advancement in information delivery at the point of care"
Friday, 20 March 2009
Copyrights and wrongs
As you fire up the photocopier do you stop to think about the legality of your copying?
o The originals must be owned by the NHS.
o You may copy up to two articles from a journal issue (more from a themed issue), and one chapter or 5% of a book.
o Within these extent limits, you may make as many multiple copies as required.
o Copies from books and journals published in the UK may be scanned.
o Scanned copies may be supplied via the NHS network but not placed on intranets or websites.
o Only single paper photocopies may be made for patients and carers.
o Publications in the ‘CLA list of excluded categories and works’ are not covered by the licence
Friday, 13 March 2009
EvidenceUpdates - targeting what you need to see
We recently posted about our Knowledge Alerts service. EvidenceUpdates is a fantastic service that complements Knowledge Alerts by providing a simple means to receive highly targeted updates on clinical specialty areas. The service is operated by McMaster University in Canada (a leading centre in the development of Evidence-Based Clinical Practice) and brought to you free of charge by BMJ Publishing Group.
The content is built up from the citations of over 160 leading clinical journals. These are rated for quality, clinical relevance and interest by practicing physicians.
On registration you select the areas of interest for you choosing first the population group (Neonates, Pediatrics, Adolescents, Adults, Geriatrics or all) and then discipline (a broad range of specialties and sub specialties). You can choose to be alerted anywhere between daily and once a week.
Then comes the really interesting bit. Cut off scores (4-7) are available for both relevance and newsworthiness. Broadly items rated four on both scales are possibly relevant and useful but likely conforming to a widely known view. Items rated seven on both scales are definitely and highly relevant and Useful information not likely to be known unless you read the item. Clearly the higher the levels you set the fewer articles you will be notified about but helpfully the registration form shows how many articles would have been sent to you each month over the past year. You can tweak the levels until you reach a level you will be happy with.
Once you have signed up you can also search against the database using the relevance and newsworthiness scales.
Give it a try and let us know how you get on.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Get Intute
The internet is a treasure trove of riches but where to start? The majority of people just plunge off into Google but might there sometimes be a better option? We are going to explore some of the possibilities on this blog. Please use the comments to suggest others we might want to share with people.
Intute (terrible name - brilliant site) is a great place to start. Intute has built a collection of quality assessed sites ranged around different topic areas. For our purposes we are most interested in those under Health and Life Sciences which further break down into:
You can search or browse in each section or across all the resources. There are some 33,000 resources claimed included. While this sounds a lot it is much more manageable than a free search on many millions of potential pages in Google.
Each resources in Intute has a clear description and has been indexed to increase the likelyhood of it being presented when you need it (you won't be suprised to hear Librarians are involved in preparing the site).
So next time you need to start researching a topic and are not sure where to start - try Intute. As a bonus they are currently looking for feedback and you can win a £50 Amazon Voucher for letting them know what you think.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
February New Books
Click the Booklist link to see all the new titles, and check NewhamCat for details of our complete stock.
Image (c) Creative Commons