Wednesday 23 December 2015

New titles added to Clinical Key

Elsevier have added a new electronic journal and selection of books to Clinical Key this month, including:

Journal

Books
Clinical Key is a fantastic, easy to use resource that contains huge amounts of full text content including:
  • 1,400 topic pages
  • Over 600 electronic journals 
  • Over 1000 electronic books
  • 850 First Consult monographs
  • 17,000 + medical / surgical videos
  • 300 + Procedures Consult videos
  • 15,000 patient education handouts
  • 2.2 million images
  • You can find a full content list here
To access Clinical Key all you need is your OpenAthens password (register online here if you don't have one) to get started.

Our subscription to Clinical Key this year was generously funded by the Northamptonshire Health Charitable Fund.


Thursday 17 December 2015

Christmas opening at the libraries

All the libraries will be open until Christmas Eve.

Berrywood Hospital Library will be staffed from Tuesday the 29th until Thursday the 31st of December, and then will reopen on Monday the 4th of January.

Isebrook Hospital Library will be closed on Christmas Eve and reopen on Monday the 4th of January. Please contact one of the other libraries if you require any help during this period.

The Richmond Library at Northampton General Hospital will be staffed from Tuesday the 29th until Thursday the 31st of December, and then will reopen on Monday the 4th of January.

24 hour access will be available to registered users as normal throughout the Christmas period at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries.

We would like to wish you a very happy Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year. We look forward to seeing you in 2016.

Monday 7 December 2015

Library information skills programme for 2016

Need to find information to support your clinical practice? Need to make a decision but can't find the supporting evidence? Starting a course but can't find the study material? Found the evidence but unsure what it means? We can help.

All of our training programme dates for 2016 are now available on the Library's web site.

"The Pre-course Course made studying so much easier"
Our courses are free to access for staff and attached students from Northamptonshire Healthcare and Northampton General Hospital.

They are aimed at both clinicians and managers who want to be able to find and use the best possible evidence to support their decision making.

The courses run at a variety of locations including the Berrywood and Northampton General hospitals, as well as Bevan House in Kettering.

So what do we offer?

If you are about to return to studying a formal programme, our Pre-course Course may be just the thing. The course is designed to equip you with the information skills you need to make the path through you programme that bit easier. The 3 hour sessions cover things like finding the material on your reading lists, using databases and how to identify good quality information. It also covers searching for evidence and guidelines and how to access electronic journals. Everything you should need to get you started.

If you need to find research, then our Literature Searching course may be the answer. This will enable you to effectively search a number of databases such as Medline, HMIC (healthcare management) or the British Nursing Index through the NHS's HDAS interface. We'll show you how to search, save your results and even access full text journal articles, straight from the databases.

Once you have found the evidence, you need to know if it is any good and what it means, and again, we can help with that via our Critical Appraisal Skills programme.

So what is the NNT in this RCT then?
Our Introduction to Critical Appraisal workshop will take you through the statistics, terminology and process, while our highly interactive Critical Appraisal in Action session gives you the opportunity to appraise a research article in a group facilitated by one of our librarians.

As well as our published workshops, we can also create tailored sessions for you team or department, and  we can always do a one to one session if you can't make any of our published dates, and we can even come to you.

Finally, if face to face training is not your thing, or you just want a little help, we have a selection of videos on our YouTube channel that can help you with getting to grips with some of these skills.

Tuesday 1 December 2015

Web site of the month: The Library Advent Calendar


The 24 days of library
The 24 days of Library! We have created a library Advent calendar on our catalogue site.

Simply visit the site and click on the tree like the one opposite to see the Advent item of the day. We've started with the link between drinking champagne and staving off dementia.

Each day there will be a new snippet, health related stories, good sources of information and even the odd library related item.

Of course the added bonus is our Advent calendar is not fattening, contains no alcohol (champagne story aside) and is both gluten & dairy free. You may even learn something useful...