New national collection of electronic resources available from April 2019

Health Education England have now finished their re-procurement of the NHS National Core Content.

The core content is a selection of electronic resources that are purchased on behalf of all NHS staff in England and available via NHS Open Athens accounts.

Following the re-procurement some services have been withdrawn from the core content collection and others added. Most notable on the withdrawals is the decommissioning of CINAHL plus with full text, which means the loss of a large number of nursing journals online, as well as the Health Business Elite database.

The new core content selection will be available from April 2019 until March 2022 and consists of:

Point of Care tool ~new~
HEE have announced the provision of a point of care tool.

BMJ Best Practice provides summaries of evidence to support decision making in clinical practice and offers "step by step guidance on diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and prevention is updated daily using robust evidence based methodology and expert opinion".

Databases (available via the HDAS interface):

• AMED (Allied and complementary medicine)
• British Nursing Index
• CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature)
• Embase
• Emcare ~new~
• HMIC (Health Management Information Consortium)
• Medline
• PsychInfo

Electronic journals collections (available via My Journals and HDAS)

• BMJ Publishing e-journals collection 
• Health Research Premium Collection (formerly ProQuest Hospitals Collection)
• PsychARTICLES 
• Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection ~new~

Please contact the Library Service if you have any questions about the national core content or any other of our electronic resources.

NHS Libraries - #amilliondecisions

Health libraries have a big impact on the Trusts that they work with, supporting clinicians and managers to deliver the best possible care and make the best possible decisions, fully apprised of the evidence base behind them.

Health Education England and CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals) has recently launched the #amilliondecisions campaign to support the work of NHS library services.

Professor Ian Cumming OBE, Chief Executive, HEE said: “Every day across the healthcare sector more than a million decisions are made which have a profound impact on people’s lives and which influence the quality and cost of healthcare services.  The Government and health organisations have obligations under the Health and Social Care Act to ensure the use of evidence from research and to make use of the best available evidence in their decision-making.”

Nick Poole, CILIP Chief Executive said: “We encourage anyone responsible for healthcare services to take a look at the astonishing impact on the cost and quality of care when healthcare teams have good access to the specialist expertise of clinical librarians and knowledge specialists.

To those leading healthcare services, it’s a call to ensure that your part of the NHS or sector is meeting its duties under the Act, and where there are gaps, to work with CILIP and HEE to put arrangements in place so that your organisation and staff are able to access the evidence to inform their practice and decision-making.”

You can also follow the campaign on Twitter using the #amilliondecisions hashtag

If you work for Northamptonshire Healthcare or Northampton General Hospital you can already access our services. Have a look at our web site or pop into one of the libraries in person to find out how we can help you...

Updated study shows the value of medical libraries

A study published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association shows the impact medical libraries can have on patient care. 

"The value of library and information services in patient care"* reported that 3/4s of 16,122 survey respondents (a variety of clinicians) said that as a result of using information from a library they had definitely or probably changed aspects of patient care as a result.

The changes reported included patient advice (48%), diagnosis (25%), choices of drugs or other treatment (33% and 31%). 95% said the information resulted in a better clinical decision.

The survey also showed that the use of libraries allowed clinicians to avoid adverse events including additional tests (19%), misdiagnosis (13%), adverse drug reactions or medication errors (13% and 12%) and patient mortality (6%).

Clinicians also commented on the value of having access to professional librarians who can assist with patient  care, either through the provision of evidence based literature searches, or through training in the most effective use of information resources.

* Marshall, J.G. Sollenberger,  S. Easterby-Gannett, L.K. et al, (2013) The Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care: Results from a Multisite Study, Journal of the Medical Library Association 101(1) 38-46.  Available from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543128/