Stoptober - like October, but without cigarettes

28 day challenge

During October, thousands of people across England are taking part in Stoptober - a new 28 day challenge to stop smoking.

There's lots of free support to help smokers along the way, including a free App for PCs & smartphones to track your progress, a pack containing tools and tips (including a stress ball to give you something to do with your hands!) and you can even sign up to receive daily motivational texts. By stopping smoking for 28 days, you are five times more likely to stay smoke free!

For more information on smoking and advice on how to give up see the Smoke Free site which includes tools, video stories from real quitters, tips on the best ways to give up and more.

The Northamptonshire county wide service can also be contacted on smokefree@northants.nhs.uk or call 0845 6013116.

NICE BNF and BNFC apps for smartphones and tablets

The NICE British National Formulary (BNF) and NICE British National Formulary for Children (BNFC) apps have been developed to provide easy access to the latest up-to-date prescribing information from the most widely-used medicines information resources within the NHS. 

Both the BNF and BNFC apps are available to download for free by health and social care professionals who work for or who are contracted by NHS England.

To access the apps you will need an NHS Athens password (NHS staff and attached students can register online). You can find more information about the apps, system requirements and trouble shooting on the NICE site.

Download NICE BNF

BNF: Android smartphone and tablet users

BNF: iPhone and iPad users

Download NICE BNFC

BNFC: Android smartphone and tablet users

BNFC: iPhone and iPad users

NICE have also produced an app allowing access to all of their guidance via smartphones and tablets which

Nice Guidance App

• Browse over 760 items (7000+ chapters) of NICE guidance. Guidance is arranged topically by conditions and diseases, and public health topics
• Rapidly search all NICE Guidance on your smartphone
• Select full guidance documents or selections of individual chapters from guidance documents, bookmark individual sections of guidance chapters for use as offline reference on your smartphone
• Automatically receive updates and new guidance as soon as it's published on the NICE website.

Help us to buy the books you need

books, a photo by life spirit1 on Flickr.

We have taken delivery of a new collection of books on approval. Our on approvals scheme enables library users to review a selection of new titles covering a broad range of clinical and non-clinical topics and recommend any that they think it would be useful for us to stock.

The books are available to view at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries and will be available to view until Friday the 26th of October. 

For further information please see the full list of the titles (arranged by topic).

Of course, if you have other recommendations for items you think we should stock we are always happy to receive them.

You can also find a list of recent acquisitions on our web site.

Cochrane Library - new search functionality

On 15 September 2012, Wiley will be introducing an improved search interface for The Cochrane Library. There will be a phased implementation with some additional features being added in phase 2, shortly after the initial launch.
Users will see major changes to the layout of search pages and will soon be able to use new search features including:
• Auto-suggest features within both basic and MeSH search functions
• Updated display of search results and filtering options
• Ability to view search terms and results on the same page
• Ability to insert lines and add one search to one another
• Improved MeSH look-up feature
• Hover-over Tool Tips giving a brief explanation of the functions

All previously saved searches will be transferred onto the new search platform, with no action required on the part of users HOWEVER we strongly suggest that you make a hard copy back up of any complex or important searches as a precaution. You can Export any Saved Searches in Cochrane, or for smaller searches, a screenshot may be adequate.
During the migration period you will be able to search The Cochrane Library, view articles and run saved searches. However for successful migration of searches, you will be prevented from saving new searches or editing existing searches for 24 hours prior to the launch.

More information is available online including a PowerPoint demonstration outlining the new features at:
http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/view/0/ccochnewsearch.html

Berrywood Library team win Trust award

We are really delighted to announce that the team at Berrywood Hospital Library have been the recipients of a Trust PRIDE award. 

The team are particularly pleased because the award is for the positive impact their work has had directly on patient care, as well as "exceptional work in research" and the proactive approach the team takes in providing information to clinicians.

Some of the team from Berrywood L-R Angela Concannon, Anne Tales,
Gary Meades and presenting the award, head of IM&T Andy Brown

This award is a reflection of the hard work of all the library staff, and the rest of the team, Sue Jones, Anita O'Brien, Susan Russell and David Abdy are missing from the photo but deserve a mention!

Wardipedia - a new resource for inpatient mental health care

www.wardipedia.org

Star Wards has launched the world's first ever comprehensive resource on providing therapeutic care for mental health inpatients. Wardipedia has over 1,000 examples of good practice from wards across the UK.

This online, collaborative compendium has other features to support ward staff including ideas for enhancing patients’ experiences, the evidence base for these, ideas from related sectors and links to hundreds of useful sites, practical resources and documents.

The site is very easy to use and most of the ideas in Wardipedia are very low-cost, simple to implement and result in immediate improvements to patients' and staff experiences. Well worth a visit!

Journal usage survey September 2012

Throughout the whole of September we will be conducting a survey into the use of our current journal subscriptions. We are doing this to ensure we get the best value from the titles we subscribe to and do not waste money by purchasing journals that few people read (and we can still supply articles from any journal not in stock of course).

Courtesy of CedarLakeReflections

Our electronic journals automatically collect statistics, but we also need to know about our print journals too. We ask that if you come into one of the libraries and read a journal, that you help us by ticking the slip you will find attached to the front cover of any of the current issues.

Likewise if you read an issue without a slip, please place it in one of the journals survey boxes you'll find in the libraries so we can make sure we include it in our usage count.

Do let us know if you have any questions about the journals survey.

Library catalogue working again

The hardware problem has now been fixed by our IT team and our catalogue is back up and running as normal.