May bank holiday closure

All the libraries will be unstaffed on Monday the 6th of May for the bank holiday.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

24 hour access is available as usual to our registered members by swiping in using your library card at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries.

We reopen as normal on Tuesday the 7th at all of our sites.

Latest evidence updates from NICE

NICE have published three evidence updates in April.

Autism diagnosis in children and young people offers a summary of new evidence in relation to NICE guideline 128 ‘Autism – recognition, referral and diagnosis of children and young people on the autism spectrum’ (2011)

Self-harm: longer term management reviews the evidence in relation to guideline 133 ‘Self-harm: longer term management’ (2011)

School-based interventions to prevent the uptake of smoking among children and young people covers the evidence in relation to NICE public health guideline 23 (2010) 

Evidence Updates do not replace current accredited guidance and do not provide formal recommendations, but they do highlight new evidence that health and social care professionals may wish to consider alongside current guidance.

You can find all of the previous updates on the NICE Evidence Services (formerly NHS Evidence) site.

New social care comparison service launched

Choosing Care

The Government has launched a new service which aims to provide a comprehensive source of information on care services. The site, a part of the NHS Choices service, allows the comparison of residential care homes as well as other care services. It brings together information from a variety of sources including:

• official information from the Care Quality Commission inspection reports on care services
• information from care providers on the specialist services and facilities they offer, with details of staff and other useful information such as sample menus, photos of rooms and gardens
• comments from the public, service users, residents and their families on their own experiences of the care provider, including links to other comment sites
• from next month, the ability for the public to give services star ratings
• official Ofsted-style rating for care services, when they are introduced

Currently there is information on over 8000 providers with more being added.

The site also features information about choosing care services, explanations of different care options and on getting help with the costs of care.

CQC Adult Inpatient Survey 2012

www.cqc.org.uk

The CQC have now published the results of the survey of inpatients in England that ran between September 2012 and January 2013.

The survey had over 64,500 participants who had at least one overnight stay (there were some exclusions including psychiatric and maternity admissions).

Results

• National summary of results
• Full comparison with the 2011 survey
• A-Z List of participating trusts and their results
• Technical details of how trusts were scored

Local Trusts

• Northampton General Hospital Results
• Northampton General Hospital Benchmark Report (comparing local results with national data)

• Kettering General Hospital Results
• Kettering General Hospital Benchmark Report 

Books!

by Raoul Luoar on Flickr.

We have a new selection of On Approval Books for April and May. They cover topics such as mental health, CBT, midwifery, nursing, pharmacology, surgery and many more. These are recently published titles on loan from our supplier and we are looking for recommendations on which titles we should buy. This is your chance to help ensure the stock we hold reflects your needs (of course we are also happy to have any other recommendations you may have too!). You can find a  full list on our web site and the books are held at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries.

You can also find a list of the latest titles we have added to our stock for March and April on our web site (as well as previous lists going back 6 months), or you can search our catalogue to see everything we hold.

Changes to NHS Evidence

The new NICE Evidence Services site

There are a number of changes being made to NHS Evidence. The service has been re-branded and is now NICE Evidence Services.

Whilst much of the content (as well as the web address) remains unchanged, there are some new additions to the site:

• Clinical Knowledge Summaries have been relaunched. The CKS are aimed at practitioners in primary care and aim to provide high quality summaries of evidence for the 300 conditions most commonly seen in primary care
• Medicines Information. The NeLM (National electronic Library for Medicines) site has been closed down and the content moved into NICE Evidence Services. You can search for information using the NICE Evidence Search, or via the Medicines A-Z list.

Other services available via the site include:

• NICE Evidence Search - the search engine for the site (although you may want to consider TRIP as an alternative)
• Access to electronic journals
• Access to databases, including Medline, the British Nursing Index and the Cochrane Library
• UK Duets which is a database of treatment uncertainties
• Topics A-Z covering clinical and public health information
• QIPP collection including case studies and productivity tools
• Bulletins and Alerts which include, evidence updates and the new Medicines Awareness Service.

Web site of the month: Evidently Cochrane

The latest Cochrane news

Evidently Cochrane is a blog from the UK Cochrane Centre aimed at sharing the very latest evidence from the Cochrane Library.

Each blog entry gives a short summary of the findings from the latest Cochrane Reviews covering key messages, findings from the review and the quality of the evidence, as well as links to the full text. There are also guest blogs covering topics raised in the reviews.

The site has an RSS feed and you can follow the Cochrane Centre on Twitter for the latest updates too.

Evidently Cochrane is a great way of keeping up to date with the latest "gold standard" in evidence in a very user friendly way and we highly recommend it.