Fancy a change of scene? We are recruiting...

The Richmond Library

It's no secret that working in a library is a popular choice (indeed, in 2015 YouGov research listed librarian as the 2nd most desirable job in Britain). If this is something that appeals to you, we may be able to help.

We are currently recruiting for a part-time library assistant (working Wednesday to Friday, 9-5), based at the Richmond Library, Northampton General Hospital, but also providing cover for our satellite library at Isebrook Hospital in Wellingborough.

We're looking for someone with great customer service skills as you will often be the first point of contact with the NHS staff who use our services.

We need someone who is adaptable, confident, and able to deal with the full range of staff and students. You will have a good level of general education and be IT literate. Previous experience of working in a library would be a bonus but is by no means essential. A sense of humour would also be an asset.

Our library assistants undertake a range of general duties including staffing our reception desks and dealing with users, carrying out library inductions, sourcing documents, answering enquiries and supporting users with finding information and general IT queries.

You will also be given overall responsibility for one or more areas of work, and of course, appropriate training will be given.

If you are interested in this role you can find more information, including how to apply, on the NHS Jobs web site here.

We look forward to hearing from you...

New selection of books for review

Russians Reading & Writing courtesy

 of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Our preferred method of selecting books to buy is via a recommendation from our users. To that end we have a new set of books on approval for review. The scheme gives you the chance to browse a selection of newly published titles covering a variety of health and related topics and let us know if there are any you would like us to buy for the Library's collection.

Our current selections are available at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries until Friday the 24th of February. The topics covered include:

• Autism
• Counselling
• Epidemiology
• Medicine
• Mental health, psychiatry and psychology
• Neurology
• Nursing
• Research
• ...and more

Of course, we are always happy to have recommendations for new stock on any health related topic.

You can also find a list of titles we have recently purchased (including previous on approvals) on our web site, and all of our stock via our catalogue.

Access to TRIP Pro extended for 2017

www.tripdatabase.com

Health Education England have funded access to the premium version of TRIP until the end of December 2017.

If you aren't already familiar with it, TRIP is a UK clinical database designed to allow clinicians to find the best evidence to answer their clinical questions.

TRIP presents search results in a hierarchy based on the level of evidence, so you always see the highest quality information, for example, systematic reviews or metaanalysis, first (but you can sort the results by date or relevance too).

TRIP has an easy to use simple search, but also offers two other ways to search in a more sophisticated way.

The advanced search option is very similar to the same feature in Google and allows you to combine search terms in different ways to find the information you want (including phrase searching, limiting by year and excluding words).

The PICO (Patient/Population Intervention Comparison Outcome) interface allows you easily break your search down into its most important elements which is really useful when answering a clinical question.

TRIP Pro is only accessible from an NHS computer (via its IP address). When accessing the site you should see the message about your account being provided by Health Education England as below.

TRIP is still accessible for free outside of the NHS, but with more limited search functionality.

A great resource for finding high quality health information, TRIP is a great starting point for any literature search...

Stay up to date with our daily health news service

There is a huge amount of news coverage of the NHS. With some many different sources of information, it can sometime be hard to know where to start, especially with the increase in fake news on social media in this "post-truth" age.

But we can help.

Our Daily Health News service scans feeds from over 60 different sources every day. We  review them and the ones we think you will find most useful are then posted onto our Blogger site, giving you just one place to look if you want to find out what is new in health and the NHS.

We don't include a lot of clinical items (you can find more of that via our Twitter account). Our feeds include:

• Local media coverage of Northamptonshire health issues
• NHS, DoH and other government sites
• Think tanks like the King's Fund, Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation
• Royal Colleges
• Voluntary groups and charities
• Health related news sites like OnMedica
• Mainstream media sites like the BBC, and newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian

You can access this service in a number of different ways:

• Visit the web site
• Subscribe to our RSS feed (you can find it here)
• Most conveniently - you can subscribe to the service by email and receive one message a day with a digest of all the news, complete with links to take you straight to the item. Simply enter your email address here and you will be sent a confirmation email. Once you have clicked on the link in the email your subscription will be live. We will never use your email address for anything else or share it with anyone, and you can unsubscribe from the service at any time.

Our Daily Health News Service is an easy way to keep up to date with the issues facing the NHS and health care and we hope you will find it useful...

Web site(s) of the month - fact checking

There is an increasing amount of fake news out there, especially on social media, as well as Internet and email scams. Indeed the term "post truth" was the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year.

In this context, how do you know if the Tweet, Facebook post or email you get contains genuine information, a hoax, a joke or something more sinister?

It is difficult sometimes to distinguish the fake stories from the real, so the answer is to fact check, and there are plenty of sites that will soon tell you if it's real news or a hoax. Here are a few we think are worth a look:

• Hoax Slayer - Particularly useful for email and social media articles, Hoax Slayer is a really up to date source of information for those dodgy emails you sometimes get asking you to do something or the viral hoaxes you see again and again on social media.
  
• Snopes - Great for checking on a news stories to see if they are real, Snopes sorts the truth from the urban legend.

• Full Fact - An independent, UK based fact checking organisation, Full Fact are less about hoaxes and more about checking the facts behind serious news stories, legal issues, the claims of political parties and the like.
  
• BBC Reality Check - Offers a similar service to Full Fact but just focused on news stories. They also have a Twitter account you can follow for regular updates.

So if you receive an email or see a Tweet you can't quite believe, it may be because you can't actually believe it. One of these sites might just clarify which it is...