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.