A Modern Hospital: Memories of Princess Marina Hospital

Princess Marina Hospital in Northampton was one of the last NHS learning disability hospitals to be built. It was opened in 1972 and at the time was the most modern facility in the whole of Europe. The hospital finally closed in 1995.

Research carried out by the Finding Out Group (four people with learning disabilities who had research training) looked at the perspective of nursing and other staff from Northamptonshire Healthcare who worked at Princess Marina.

This is a oral history project supported by NHS nurses (many of whom worked at Princess Marina themselves) and authored by Jan Walmsley (Visiting Professor in the History of Learning Disability at the Open University).

The booklet is available for free online at the Centre for Welfare Reform or you can download a PDF here.

There is also a Power Point (download) of the findings with lots of photos on the Open University's web site. 

New titles added to Clinical Key

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

Journals

• American Journal of the Medical Sciences
• Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging 
• Diagnostics in Neuropsychiatry
•  European Urology Focus 
• Gastrointestinal Intervention 
• Journal of the American Pharmacists Association
• Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada (JOGC) 
•  Neoplasia 
• Radiology Case Reports 
• Translational Oncology 
• Visual Journal of Emergency Medicine

Books

• Atlas of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (Kademani, Deepak) New to CK
• Endodontics: Principles and Practice (Torabinejad, Mahmoud) 5th ed; New to CK
• Manual of Coronary Chronic Total Occlusion Interventions (Brilakis, Emmanouil) New to CK
• McDonald and Avery’s Dentistry for the Child and Adolescent (Dean, Jeffrey) 10th ed
• Netter’s Atlas of Neuroscience (Felten, David) 3rd ed

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.

January Eyes on Evidence

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 January issue you can find:

• Oxygen therapy for acute ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction
• Managing chronic rhinosinusitis in adults
• Thyroid function testing in primary care
• Occupational therapy for older people with stroke-related disabilities who live in care homes
• Long-term mental health effects of bullying during adolescence

Evidence summaries from NICE’s Medicines and Prescribing Programme:

• Diabetes mellitus type 1 and type 2: insulin glargine biosimilar (Abasaglar)
• Type 2 diabetes mellitus in adults: high-strength insulin glargine 300 units/ml (Toujeo)
• Diabetic nephropathy: blood pressure-lowering therapy
• Early breast cancer: adjuvant bisphosphonate treatment beneficial in postmenopausal women

You can find subscribe to receive the bulletin by email on the NICE Evidence Services site.

Web site (sort of) of the month: ScHARR Research Hacks

Not strictly speaking a web site, this is a playlist of videos on YouTube from the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield.

The videos are all short (mostly around 1 minute) and feature a range of useful tools to enable researchers (or anyone else) to better able to find and share information as well as tips on collaborating.

The topics covered include using Google Drive and Netvibes, making a podcast, having an online meeting, Google Scholar and many more.

You can also download all the videos via iTunes.

For anyone interested in research or collaborative working, we think this is a really useful resource.

New titles added to Clinical Key

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

Journal

• Arthroplasty Today

Books

• Bradley’s Neurology in Clinical Practice (Daroff, Robert) 7th ed
• Campbell-Walsh Urology (Wein, Alan) 11th ed
• Cardiovascular Pathology (Buja, L. Maximilian) 4th ed, New to CK
• Conn’s Current Therapy 2016 (Bope & Kellerman) 1st ed
• Emergency Medicine Secrets (Markovchick, Vincent); 6th ed
• Evidence-Based Practice of Critical Care (Deutschman, Clifford) 2nd ed
• Medical Microbiology (Murray, Patrick) 8th ed
• Miller’s Review of Orthopaedics (Miller, Mark) 7th ed
• Netter’s Orthopaedic Clinical Examination: An Evidence Based Approach (Cleland, Joshua) 3rd ed
• Otologic Surgery (Brackmann, Derald) 4th ed
• Williams Textbook of Endocrinology (Melmed, Shlomo) 13th ed

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.