Website of the month: the National Elf Service

Produced by Minervation, the National Elf Service is a collection of web sites aimed at health professionals and is a really useful resource for keeping up to date with the latest evidence and what it might mean for practice.

The elves (who are subject experts), find the latest high quality research, critically appraise it and then summarise the evidence in short, easy to read, blog style entries across a range of topics.

The current elf service is made up of:

The elves hard a work appraising evidence

• Commissioning Elf
• Dental Elf
• Diabetes Elf
• Education Elf
• Learning Disabilities
• Lifestyle Elf
• Mental Elf
• Musculoskeletal Elf

You can sign up to receive email alerts for new content. You can follow all of the elves by RSS feed or FaceBook and they are also very active on Twitter.

The National Elf Service is a great site for keeping up to date with the latest high quality research evidence, which has already been appraised for quality and summarised into "bite size" pieces. Highly recommended.

Large new collection of electronic journals added to the Library's electronic resources

The Library Service has just invested in a subscription to Medline Full Text from EBSCO. This has given you access to an additional 1,470 electronic journal titles.

The titles cover the whole range of medical, nursing and health care disciplines (if you want to see the full list you can find it here) and include both UK and international publications.

You can access all these titles (and all of our other ejournals) in two different ways:

• If you know the journal title you are interested in, go to the NICE Evidence Services Journals page. You can browse or search for the title you are interested in and access the full text content from there.
• If you want to search by subject, you can do so on the NICE Evidence Services Databases page. All of our e-journals are linked into the databases so whenever your search bring up an article we hold electronically, a simple click should take you through to the full text. 

If you need help with database searching we offer training courses and also have a selection of short videos on YouTube to guide you through the process. We can also undertake a search on your behalf.

To access either of these resources you will need to have an Athens password. NHFT and NGH users can obtain one by registering online here. If you need help with registering see our brief YouTube video.

We hope you find this excellent new resource useful.

Go Christmas book shopping with our money

We have taken delivery of our Christmas selection of books on approval. Our on approvals scheme gives you the chance to come into the Berrywood or Richmond libraries and browse through a selection of brand new titles and recommend any you would like us to buy and add to our stock.

What could be better than Christmas shopping without any credit card hangovers (even if it is work related)?

What do you want to read in 2014?

Our current selection will be available until the 3rd of January and includes titles on:

• Cardiovascular medicine
• CBT
• Communication skills
• Leadership and management
• Nursing - adult and psychiatric
• Paediatrics 
• Pharmacology
• Psychiatry and psychology
• Public health
• Surgery

Of course we are always happy to have recommendations for other items of stock on any health related topic.

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

November Eyes on Evidence from NICE

Eyes on Evidence is a free monthly bulletin from NICE Evidence Services  which reviews significant new evidence as it emerges and what this may mean for current practice.

In the November issue you can find:

• Bias reporting of randomised controlled trials in breast cancer
• Prevention and treatment of pressure ulcers
• Intermittent pneumatic compression for deep vein thrombosis in patients with stroke
• Passive smoking and meningococcal disease in children and young people
• Minimally invasive surgery for gastro-oesophogeal reflux disease 
• Evidence update on urinary tract infections in children 

You can find all the previous issues of Eyes on Evidence and subscribe by email on the NICE Evidence Services site.

Find more information on our upgraded catalogue

More detail now available

We have just upgraded the our catalogue to give you more information when you search.

As well as finding the usual bibliographic details of all of our book stock (author, title etc.), you will now find an image of the book's cover (which is handy when looking for it on the shelves).

In addition to the covers, most titles now have a descriptive summary included which will give you a good idea of the book's content. Some records also include details of the author(s) and tables of contents too. Just click on "A Look Inside" to see all the details.

We hope it will make finding the information you need a little easier.

Library information skills programme for 2014

"If only I'd done the library training..."

Need to find some information to inform your practice? Need to make a decision but can't find the evidence? Found the evidence but not sure of it's validity? We can help.

All of our training programme dates for 2014 are now available on the Library's web site.

Our courses are free to access for staff and attached students from Northamptonshire Healthcare and Northampton General Hospital.

Our courses 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.

Evidence for Health is a great introduction to finding high quality health information on the Internet. The course is totally hands on and takes in sites such as NICE Evidence Services and TRIP, as well as looking at more advanced searching options in Google.

If you need to find journal articles our Literature Searching course can help. This will enable you to effectively search healthcare databases such as Medline, the British Nursing Index and HMIC (healthcare management) to find the information you need and even retrieve full text electronic journal articles.

"The confidence interval you say?"

Of course, once you have found the information you need to know how to assess it and our Critical Appraisal skills workshops can help.

Our Introduction to Critical Appraisal will give you a basic understanding of the terminology and process, whilst our highly interactive Critical Appraisal in Action session gives you the opportunity to appraise a piece of research in a group facilitated by a librarian. 

It doesn't end with our published programme though. We can also create a tailored session for your department and can also do one to one sessions if you can't make any of our dates, and we can even come to you. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a session.

Problem with the thesaurus in the CINAHL and Health Business Elite databases

Users of the CINAHL (nursing) and Health Business Elite databases on the NICE Evidence Services HDAS platform may have noticed a problem with using the thesaurus.

Currently if you click on a subject heading it may tell you that it could not be mapped. Free text searching is still working correctly.

The database supplier (EBSCO) are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible.

Web site of the month: Our YouTube Channel!

We know it's hard to find the time to come on a workshop (but if you can we run a programme of different information skills training workshops) or you may only need a refresher on how to do something specific.

We have created our own YouTube channel and have developed some very short training videos to help get you through the process of searching the healthcare databases to find information.

Our current videos cover:

• Registering for an Athens account
• How to log in to HDAS and select the right database
• Conducting a simple search
• Saving your search results
• Using the clipboard to save search results from multiple databases

Each video if fully illustrated with screen recordings and step-by-step instructions. They are also "bite sized", mainly between 2 and 3 minutes long and are even suitable for use while you are trying to search.

We will be developing more videos over time, and would love to have your feedback on what we have done so far and if there are any other topics you would like to see us cover.

European Antibiotic Awareness Day resources

18th of November

The European Antibiotic Awareness Day is an annual event, running on the 18th of November, designed to raise awareness of the threat of antibiotic resistance and to encourage best practice in antibiotic use (you can find the Department of Health's Antimicrobial Strategy 2013-2018 here).

The Department of Health has produced a number of resources for use in conjunction with European Antibiotic Day for both primary and secondary care.

Among the general items available are:

• A briefing with key messages
• Posters aimed at patients
• A leaflet
• Quizzes and crosswords
• Case studies in antimicrobal stewardship

There are also:

• Resources specific to secondary care including a prescribers check list and posters
• Resources specific to primary care including a web banner and the target antibiotics tool kit

You can also find a number of short videos on YouTube that could be used in waiting rooms and other public areas to deliver the message (the audio from these is also available for download as an MP3 file).

October Eyes on Evidence from NICE

 Eyes on Evidence is a free monthly bulletin from NICE Evidence Services  which reviews significant new evidence as it emerges and what this may mean for current practice.

In the October issue you can find:

Training in patient-centred clinical consultations
A Cochrane review notes that training in patient-centred approaches for healthcare professionals may have positive effects on patients' experiences of consultation processes.

Increased risk of venous thromboembolism with glucocorticoid use
A Danish case-control study finds that use of glucocorticoids is associated with an increased risk of venous thromboembolism.

Weight in pregnancy and risk of operative delivery
A cohort study shows that women who gain large amounts of weight during pregnancy are at increased risk of needing operative delivery.

Advanced airway management after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest
A prospective population study suggests that, compared with bag-valve-mask ventilation, advanced airway management is associated with lower rates of favourable neurological outcomes after out-of hospital cardiac arrest.

Physical activity and behaviour during school break times in British white and Pakistani girls aged 9–11 years
A study suggests that British Pakistani girls may be less active than British white girls during school break times.

Evidence Updates
NICE has recently published Evidence Updates on:

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Local health profiles for 2013 published

Public Health England have published details of the local health profiles for England. The profiles give a snapshot of health related issues for each county and local authority area.

There are also interactive maps on the site that show a number of different indicators, down to district level (and a guide is available to help you get the most from them).

Within each profile you can find information on:

• Social issues, including deprivation, crime education levels
• Children & young people's health, including alcohol, obesity and teenage pregnancy
• Adult health and lifestyle
• Disease and poor health
• Life expectancy and causes of death

You can find all the profiles for the different areas of Northamptonshire here.

Web site of the month: Scirus

www.scirus.com

Scirus is a search engine that is purely focused on scientific information. It filters out non-scientific information, allowing you to conduct a much more focused search than you could on a general search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo.

With an index covering over 575 million items it allows users to search for journal content, but also the wider internet including web sites, course information, institutions and more.

Scirus also has a number of really useful search tools, particularly in the advanced search option, including:

• Search by subject areas, including medicine, psychology and life sciences
• Search for authors, journals or articles or other types of information
• Search by date range
• Boolean search (AND, OR, ANDNOT)
• Wildcard searching
• Automatic spellchecking of search terms
• Refine and even save your searches
• Display results by relevance or date
• Email or export your results

If you are looking on the Internet for science based information, Scirus is a great starting point...