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...

Wednesday, 25 November 2015

How the Library Service can benefit from your Amazon purchases

Buy it now!
How would you like to help make our budget go just that little bit further, and at no cost to yourself?

If you are an Amazon customer, its as simple as clicking a link!

By clicking on the "buy it now" link in our catalogue, on our web site or from this blog, a percentage of the price of anything you buy will come to us, all at no additional cost to you.

It doesn't matter if you are buying a book, clothing, music downloads or something expensive like a new computer, we will get a percentage of the purchase price.

The tracking ID will stay on your computer for 24 hours, so anything you purchase from Amazon in that time will automatically be included.

"What's the catch?" you may ask. There isn't one.

Clicking on the link doesn't change what you pay to Amazon, and we can't see what you have bought.

Clicking the link just means we get some money back which we can then invest in the library service to help make what we do go a little further.

So please, if you are going to be shopping with Amazon, help us at the same time as you engage in a little retail therapy, and use our Buy It Now link to send a little of Amazon's profits our way.

Thursday, 5 November 2015

Evidence for everyday nursing and midwifery

The UK Cochrane Centre have started a new social media based service to share the latest evidence in nursing and midwifery called Evidence for Everyday Nursing and Evidence for Everyday Midwifery.

The service offers evidence on common topics in nursing or midwifery in short summaries they call "blogshots" (like the one below), with links to the full evidence (often Cochrane reviews), if you want to look further.

See the evidence at the Cochrane Library


The service is available across a number of social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

We think following the the hashtags #EENursing or #EEMidwifery on Twitter is the easiest way to keep up with what's new (and if you are unsure about Twitter you can contact us for help).

This is a very easy way to keep up to date with the latest evidence affecting everyday practice, and also a useful resource in helping with revalidation. You can even share it with your colleagues or the wider professional community.

If you want more information you can find it on the Evidently Cochrane blog.

Sunday, 1 November 2015

Web site of the month: Shaare Zedek Cancer Pain and Palliative Care Reference Database

The database is a freely available specialist resource containing over 30,000 bibliographic (not full text) references relating to cancer and palliative care.

It is easy to use with a simple interface allowing you to search across multiple fields at the same time (e.g. title, author, journal, year). You can also use phrase searching and boolean operators to make your results more accurate.

A more unusual feature of the database is that the entire content is available for download, although you will need to have End Note reference management software to take advantage of this.

This free database is worth considering for anyone interested in oncology and palliative care.

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

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 might mean for current practice.

In the October issue
 you can find:
  • Intra-arterial treatment of acute ischaemic stroke
  •  Drugs with anticholinergic effects and the cognitive impairment, falls and all-cause mortality
  • Suicide prevention programmes in schools
  • Pregnancy outcomes in women who have had bariatric surgery
  • Physical and mental health of carers
Evidence summaries from NICE's Medicines and Prescribing Programme:
  • Prucalopride for chronic constipation 
  • Chronic pain: unintentional overdose in people receiving opioid analgesics for non-cancer pain 
  • Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: the effect of roflumilast on exacerbations in people with severe disease – the REACT study.
You can find subscribe to receive the bulletin by email on the NICE Evidence Services site.

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

Essential library system maintenance Monday 19th of October.

We will be conducting some essential maintenance to our library management system on Monday the 19th of October. IT will be moving it onto a different server and it will be out of action for the whole day.



This means there will be no access to our catalogue, and we will not be able to search our system, access user records or renew any loans on that day. The Bookmyne app will also be out of action for the duration of the move.

We will still be able to loan our stock if you come into the libraries.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Saturday, 10 October 2015

Books, books and more books!

You may be unsurprised to discover we are quite keen on books in the library (even though our service is much more than that).

We have added a list of all our recent acquisitions in the last month to our web site with new titles covering topics such as:

  • Health services management
  • Learning disabilities
  • Mental health 
  • Nursing & midwifery
  • Research
  • ...and many more

We also have lots of books for review in our on approvals scheme. We have a whole selection of titles to peruse, and are looking for recommendations on those you think we should buy.

Our current selections are available at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries.

We are always happy to have recommendations for new stock on any health related topic too.

Don't forget, we also have over 1000 ebooks available via Clinical Key as well as other titles, such as the new edition of the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines and the Oxford Handbook / Textbooks in Psychiatry.

Finally, if we don't have it in stock and you don't need us to buy it, we can usually borrow it for you from another library.

Monday, 5 October 2015

Libraries unstaffed, Wednesday the 14th of October

All three library sites will be unstaffed on Wednesday the 14th of October as we will be spending the day training.










Access will still be available to registered members at the Berrywood and Richmond libraries by swiping in using your membership card as usual.

We apologise for any inconvenience....

Thursday, 1 October 2015

Web site of the month: NICE learning resources

NICE have developed a range of online educational resources. Developed in conjunction with other organisations, the resources are designed to support the implementation of NICE guidance and putting evidence into practice.

The resources are all free to access, but you will need to registered to use some of them.

Topics available include: