Tuesday 24 March 2009

Nurses / Midwives - April is for YOU

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.

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 their own words:
"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"

It integrates the content of the Clinical Evidence product you may have used previously.

You can choose to search or browse and content is well structured for ease of access. An online user guide is provided.

We have a trial running till 19th April 2009. Access to the trial is via your Athens username (register online). It will be possible to set up the full product to work in the same way as UpToDate with a link from the Intranet so please try to imagine this being in place when evaluating the product.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Friday 20 March 2009

Copyrights and wrongs

As you fire up the photocopier do you stop to think about the legality of your copying?

You will be unsurprised to hear that there are limits on what you can copy. This applies whether you own the item you are copying or not. In the UK the Copyright Licensing Agency (Limited) are responsible for protecting the interests of people who publish. The NHS buys a special licence from the CLA to allow you to make the copies you need. However limits do still remain.

o Copying must be for ‘NHS purposes’.
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

The licence has recently been renewed and will remain in force till March 2010.

If you have a question about copying please contact a member of the KLS team.

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.

(C) Image Creative Commons

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


An abbreviated New Books list this month as we have been busy with other projects such as journal reorganisation.

However, those in theatres will be pleased to know that we now have two copies of the new edition of Hatfield's Complete Recovery Room Book. And we have purchased a key text in radiography education - Diagnostic ultrasound: physics and equipment by Hoskins and others.

Both students and nurses will find Davis' Guide to Clinical Nursing Skills a useful and easy-to-use reference to everyday procedures.

We also have an on-line link via our network online catalogue NewhamCat to Saving Lives 2007, the Annual report of the Director of Public Health for Newham.

Click the Booklist link to see all the new titles, and check NewhamCat for details of our complete stock.

Image (c) Creative Commons