Adding MeSH to Trip is not going to happen overnight but we’re starting on the journey. One key element we’re focusing on at the moment is ensuring all the documents within Trip are assigned MeSH terms. Many of our documents come from PubMed so these will already have MeSH terms assigned to them, we can simply grab these. However, a large number of documents (synopses, guidelines etc) don’t, so we need to ‘tag’ these documents – and this is what we’ve been doing this week.
SSoTP have informed us that they no longer wish to have a library service from us.
This means that SSoTP staff will not be able to access current ejournal subscriptions purchased by the Health Library. Thus the following titles will be removed from the NHS A-Z journal list for SSoTP staff.
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) may be the gold standard, but all that glisters is not gold, warns a research fellow at the London School of Economics.1
Alexander Krauss has analysed the 10 most commonly cited RCTs in the medical literature—all with 6500 or more citations—and found that they have potential biases that are frequently unrecognised or unacknowledged by the trials’ originators. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Maureen Dobbins is the Scientific Director at the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools and last year gave a webinar on the ‘Rapid Review Guidebook’, here it is
recently wrote about the demise of the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC). At the time it was fairly bad news as, by them aggregating the guidelines from multiple guideline publishers, it saves us considerable resource. However, every cloud has a silver lining! The NGC was not without challenges
MeSH (full name Medical Subject Headings) is a controlled vocabulary that is widely used in medical information systems. We’re actively exploring using it in Trip as we believe it can significantly improve our search results.
As far as I can tell it will improve them for two main reasons. Firstly, it’ll improve our synonyms function as MeSH is great for that. Secondly, and this is the most exciting aspect for me, is that MeSH is hierarchical. If you do a search for arrhythmia that maps to the MeSH concept of Arrhythmias, Cardiac:
CPFT specialist clinical psychologist Dr Kate Nurser has conducted the first UK research on how storytelling can help the recovery of people who have experienced mental health challenges.
NHS England-wide access to Trip Pro has been extended for a further 12 months. Access to Trip Pro is via IP address: NHS staff should get seamless access to the ‘Pro’ version of Trip from the NHS network. The features that come with NHS England-wide institutional Trip Pro access, over and above the free version of Trip, are listed here.
Over the last 12 months library staff have been working with link leads and nurse links to standardise the STAR link folders located on the wards. The link topics we have completed so far are: Safeguarding and Dementia, Nutrition, Pain, Infection Control, Resus and Medicines Management. We aim to work with link leads to get the remaining topics completed over the next few months. We also plan to start a 12 month review of the previously completed topics as well as helping to improve what is available online.
Our Fab Ambassador, Leeanne Lockley, and the Library & Knowledge Services team worked together to coordinate a Randomised Coffee Trial across the Trust as part of #FabChangeWeek.
Participants were recruited by email and via other #FabChangeWeek activities. Participants provided their name, email address and job title and we used an Excel spreadsheet to randomly pair people up.
The NIHR has funded six particular studies in the past five years on the use of evidence by commissioners. Some of this research may also be relevant to service managers in hospital trusts and other care providers and systems.
This highlight includes studies into the behaviour of individual managers and the way in which commissioning organisations make sense of and use research information when making decisions. The findings provide some practical pointers for researchers to make their work more accessible and relevant to commissioners and managers.
Learn more about critical appraisal and what tools you can use to help you to critically appraise a research paper - complete our etutorial on Critical Appraisal Tools.
We’ve just finished compiling a report of the staff publications and presentations during 2017, containing 96 entries this year.
As part of our support for research and innovation within SaTH we keep a database of the published work that involves staff of the Trust, demonstrating the volume of knowledge sharing going on in the organisation.
Network meta-analyses synthesise networks of direct and indirect comparisons of interventions, and enable researchers to simultaneously assess the effects of more than two interventions for the same condition....Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the Cochrane Collaboration typically prefer direct evidence from randomised clinical trials and conventional meta-analyses to indirect evidence. However, the WHO have recently begun using network meta-analyses to inform clinical guidelines...and some argue that the methodology should represent the highest level of evidence for instructing clinical decision-making.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Shropshire Libraries are proud to launch Autism-Friendly Libraries, to celebrate World Autism Awareness Week (26 March 2018 – 2 April 2018). With the use of the Autism-Friendly Libraries toolkit which was developed by Dimensions, a social care organisation, and the Association of Senior Children and Educational Librarians (ASCEL), staff have been trained to be aware of the issues that may become barriers to the use of our libraries by those with autism.
Our recent survey highlighted that the single most wanted new feature was the ability to save articles. Thankfully this feature is already available. But, it does reveal that we need to signpost it better!! So here we go, with this blog post.
The King’s Fund’s Information and Knowledge Services team has been responding to health policy questions for many years as part of its enquiry service. We get queries from a range of organisations and individuals including NHS staff, those working in local authorities and the voluntary sector, academics, researchers, students and the public. No question is a stupid question and we aim to answer each one as well as we can. We put our enquiries into five categories: case studies, counts, clarification, comparisons and comments. Let’s look at each category in turn using real examples of the queries we get sent.
The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford has developed a catalogue of sources of bias that may affect health care evidence, and may need to be taken into account when performing a critical appraisal on a published piece of research.
Trip allows you to export selected documents using a variety of methods (email, CSV and RIS). RIS is the standard format for referencing software (e.g. Reference Manager).
The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) is a wonderful guideline resource from the USA. It summaries all American major guidelines (it has over 1,300 guidelines) and adds much value to these. We link to the NGC records in Trip for ALL our USA guidelines.
Unfortunately, it’s funding is coming to an end and therefore Trip needs to do something to ensure we can still offer USA guidelines – hence the survey.
The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would probably have called our reliance on biomedical journal trial evidence a paradigm.... However, like all paradigms sooner or later it has begun to creak. Our reliance on journal articles needs a redefinition, if not a shift. In the last decade, evidence has accumulated, across a spectrum of different interventions, that journal publications cannot be trusted.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
This article is part of the Catalogue of Bias series. We present a description of verification bias, and outline its potential impact on research studies and the preventive steps to minimise its risk. We also present teaching slides in the online supplementary file.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust is progressing with its work to identify a new partner to run its services – but a final decision will not now be reached this month.
The effective delivery of information literacy training can be a challenging process, and health library and information professionals are constantly innovating in this area. This article presents a case study of the BHSc (Hons) Occupational therapy degree programme at York St John University to demonstrate ways in which deep integration of information skills into the curriculum can be achieved.
Rapid reviews are increasingly used by policy agencies to access relevant research in short timeframes. Despite the growing number of programmes, little is known about how rapid reviews are used by health policy agencies. This study examined whether and how rapid reviews commissioned using a knowledge brokering programme were used by Australian policy-makers.
Open Access
With thousands of smartphone apps targeting mental health, it is difficult to ignore the rapidly expanding use of apps in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Patients with psychiatric conditions are interested in mental health apps and have begun to use them. That does not mean that clinicians must support, endorse, or even adopt the use of apps, but they should be prepared to answer patients’ questions about apps and facilitate shared decision making around app use. This column describes an evaluation framework designed by the American Psychiatric Association to guide informed decision making around the use of smartphone apps in clinical care.. Login at top right hand side of page using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP- Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
The new Recovery Library in Tiverton in partnership with Flourish Cafe is a place to find a broad range of mental health and recovery resources, self-help books, mental health reference, recovery stories, and more.
Opinion and comments on a recent book on learning organisations and the changing form of learning. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Conclusions: Although we found lower response rates for Web-based invitations, this solution was more cost-effective (by a factor of 10) and had slightly lower numbers of missing values than questionnaires sent with paper invitations. Analyses of socioeconomic variables showed almost no difference between nonrespondents in both groups, which could imply that the lower response rate in the digital group does not necessarily increase the level of selection bias. Invitations to questionnaire studies via digital mail may be an excellent option for collecting research data in the future.
Conclusions: To provide health information online that is perceived as credible, experts should consider using similar language as the language used by the addressed audience. As it is often impossible to determine the exact makeup of an online audience, further research might investigate whether having experts explicitly declare which audience they intend to address can help people to more reliably assess an expert’s trustworthiness.
Local creatives are invited by Shropshire Libraries to create sketchbooks and journals, no bigger than A4 size, to a loose theme. These pieces of work will be available for other locals with a Shropshire Libraries card to borrow, or simply peruse within the historic setting that is Shrewsbury Library.
The autosynthesis project is an attempt to create automatic evidence reviews; automatically synthesising RCTs and systematic reviews.
We’re making great progress and the visualisations are stunning (see below). In fact the whole interface is amazing, allowing users to interact with the data (compared with the traditional, static, forest plot)!
Digital nurse Ellen McPake works to promote awareness of the possibilities as well as the perils for patients consulting Dr Google... Her role was created in response to fears that people with cancer were turning to the internet for information about their condition and treatment – and that they were at risk of finding bogus information on unverified sites. Part of her job is debunking the myths and preventing the harm that can come from such information.
To read the full article, log in using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens details. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
This article is the fourth in a series on New Directions. The National Health Service is under pressure, challenged to meet the needs of an ageing population, whilst striving to improve standards and ensure decision making is underpinned by evidence. Health Education England is steering a new course for NHS library and knowledge services in England to ensure access to knowledge and evidence for all decision makers. Knowledge for Healthcare calls for service transformation, role redesign, greater coordination and collaboration.
This research reports on the NICE Evidence search (ES) student champion scheme (SCS) first five years of activity (2011–2016) in terms of its impact on health care undergraduate students’ information search skills and search confidence.
The purpose of this literature review is to provide an overview of the information retrieval behaviour of clinical nurses, in terms of the use of databases and other information resources and their frequency of use.
Healthcare professionals (HCP) must apply their knowledge to their practice. Consequently, the implementation of research evidence largely depends on HCPs’ knowledge, acceptance of new evidence and choices. Improving patients’ lives and the quality of healthcare requires a strong emphasis on learning by HCP, teams and patients. Mastery of any area is never the result of a single inquiry, but is instead a continuum of inquiries, searches and reflections. Spiral learning is a teaching method in which the learner progressively gains knowledge on a subject with each encounter. Usually, complexity increases with each encounter and previous material is reinforced. Spiral learning, which is currently used in medical curricula, was initially justified because learners gained expertise as they revisited topics during practical applications. Therefore, spiral learning is suggested in this paper as an appropriate process to facilitate inquiry and effective learning.
Open Access Article
In the article, she points out that the use of eBooks in the NHS is low compared to other sectors and she presents the findings from her research, which help to explain this. She outlines the development of an electronic tool to help library and information staff make sense of the complexity around eBooks and makes further very practical recommendations for practitioners.
In this final issue of 2017, we are in a reflective mood at the Health Information and Libraries Journal as we say goodbye to Audrey Marshall, Regular Feature Editor of Dissertations into Practice. While Audrey departs, Dissertations into Practice is now a firm fixture of the Health Information and Libraries Journal; there remains no better place for students to see their writing, possibly for the first time, in print. This issue also provides an opportunity to review the breadth of health information writing through the editorials of past Virtual Issues of the Health Information and Libraries Journal, all still available, free of charge, via the journal's home page at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hilj.
In an era when library budgets are being reduced, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC's) can offer practical and viable alternatives to the delivery of costly face-to-face training courses. In this study, guest writers Gil Young from Health Care Libraries Unit - North, Lisa McLaren from Brighton and Sussex Medical School and Liverpool University PhD student Michelle Maden describe the outcomes of a funded project they led to develop a MOOC to deliver literature search training for health librarians.
Research suggests customers are more satisfied when a member of staff takes constructive action to resolve an issue rather than simply providing an empathetic response. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Researchers report that ECRs participating in this were less concerned about how they gained access to full-text scholarly information, only that they could access full-text sources. In particular, ECRs do not take much notice of libraries and their platforms, seemingly unaware of the steps libraries take to acquire and ensure access to scholarly information, while viewing physical libraries themselves primarily as study spaces for undergraduate students and not places for the ECR to visit or work. While ECRs occasionally acknowledge library portals and login interfaces, researchers found that these participants mostly ignored these, and that they found discovery services to be confusing or difficult.
Each The Human Library™ event is designed to enable interactions that challenge stereotypes and prejudices through conversation. It is a library of individual human beings, drawn from different minority or marginalised groups in the community, that are somehow exposed to stigma, misunderstanding and / or discrimination.
The research assessed online learning modules designed to teach health professions students evidence-based practice (EBP) principles in an interprofessional context across two institutions.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
While many librarians have been asked to participate in systematic reviews with researchers, often these researchers are not familiar with the systematic review process or the appropriate role for librarians. The purpose of this study was to identify the challenges and barriers that librarians face when collaborating on systematic reviews.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
The research sought to identify the general use of medical librarians in pediatric residency training, to define the role of medical librarians in teaching evidence-based medicine (EBM) to pediatric residents, and to describe strategies and curricula for teaching EBM used in pediatric residency training programs.
To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
DynaMed Plus is one of the most sought after resources in EBM. As such we’re absolutely delighted to announce that DynaMed Plus content has been added to Trip. And, what’s even better, if you’re not a subscriber to DynaMed Plus you can get ten free ‘views’ per month.
With the inclusion of DynaMed Plus to Trip I felt it was time to update the graphic that attempts to convey what users search when they use Trip. It’s a tough ask and below is my attempt (slight update on a previous graphic). Comments welcome!!
Library Search is the online catalogue and library account system for the Health Library and its partners. It includes the collections of:
Health Library for North Staffordshire
Library, Education and Resource Centre (LERC) at County (Stafford) hospital
Campus Library at Keele University
NELFT celebrated its first quality improvement week – One Small Change – from the 18th- 22nd of September.
The aim of the week was to engage with our staff and service users and ask the question “what one small change would you recommend to improve the care and services at NELFT?”
Pledge Ensuring that a pilot Trust Staff Reading Group event occurs in the new library lounge.
This is a service enhancement responding to library members suggestions and will be delivered with Wirral Public Library Service
The IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (IQVIA) have published a report examining trends in digital health tools, including apps and wearable sensors.
The All Party Parliamentary Group for Health (APPGH) have published a blog on their website by Alison Tavare, a Bristol GP, about using videos to provide health information.
Health Education England have published a guide to support the development of digital literacy by people working in health and care.
The guide maps existing resources that areavailable to individuals, line managers and organisations. It includes a wide range of resources that can help you in developing your own skills, and tools to support education and training for your team.
The boxes are themed, and at Shrewsbury we have one that covers household items (including kitchen items, a ration book, coin packs etc.), while the other contains childhood games. At Telford we have a box that cover seaside and holiday memories, and another that covers gardening.
All boxes contain copies of ‘Picture books to share’ that tie in with the box’s theme, and these books are specially designed for use with people with dementia, with large colourful pictures and photographs along with some accompanying text.