EthOS is an e-theses online service provided by the British Library. Participating institutions can deposit a digital copy of the theses of their researchers so that they can be accessed by a wider audience.
I assume this isn't Keele specific ....You can now complete the CASP (Critical Appraisal Skills Programme) checklist online, then download and save it.
Use the CASP checklists to help you to critically appraise different published research studies. You can now complete the form online, then download and save to your computer. Great for keeping a record of your critical appraisals and to add to your CPD or skills portfolio.
The directive means public sector websites and apps must be made more accessible, except in cases where this would be disproportionate. You’ll meet the new rules if your website or app meets the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility standards at level AA. This is currently WCAG 2.0.
The government intends to implement the new rules in UK law by passing regulations. These will put new duties on public sector bodies to make their websites and apps accessible.
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.