Drinks machine at Richmond Library, NGH

The drinks machine at Richmond Library, Northampton General Hospital, will not be available over the Bank Holiday weekend. Library members who are intending to use the library should bring their own drinks. The machine has been dripping water and we didn't want another library flooded!

Easter opening

All the Libraries will be unstaffed on Friday the 30th of March and Monday the 2nd of April for the Easter holiday.



24 hour access will be available as usual to registered members over the Easter period via our swipe card system at the Berrywood and Richmond Libraries.

Isebrook Library will be closed over the bank holiday.

We reopen as normal on Tuesday the 3rd at all of our sites.

Isebrook Library re-opening Monday 26th March

Isebrook Library will be re-opening on Monday 26th March. We are still waiting on repairs being done after the water pipe burst so there are some carpet tiles missing but all our stock and computers are available for use. Until the pipe has been repaired there will be no water in the Library so visitors will have to use the toilets elsewhere in the hospital. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Isebrook Library closure update

The library is now dried out, but we are still waiting on the repairs to completed.

This means we know the library will remain closed until at least Friday the 23rd of March.

We will update you when have a definitive date.

Apologies or the ongoing inconvenience. 

WiFi at the Richmond Library

We have been trialing the use of (free) WiFi at the Richmond Library (many of our regular visitors have been making use of it for some time).

Users can now bring any device into the Library and connect to the guest WiFi. Access is free but does require you to enter your email address.

NHFT staff can also now connect their Trust device to the corporate WiFi and work remotely.

This means we are now able to offer both corporate and public WiFi access at all the library sites...

Mental health & learning disability student open day Saturday March 10th

Northamptonshire Healthcare are holding a recruitment day on Saturday the 10th of March between 10 am and 2 pm at Berrywood Hospital for mental health and learning disability students.

The library at Berrywood Hospital will be open for the duration of the event and library staff will be available to talk about the role the service plays in supporting learning and nurses in practice.

This will mean it is noisier than usual at Berrywood Library for our regular users and those wanting a quiet place to work might be better off going to the Richmond Library at Northampton General Hospital.

For more information, including how to register for the event see the Northamptonshire Healthcare web site.

Isebrook Library closed due to flooding

Isebrook Library will be closed for at least the next week and possibly longer. We had a water pipe burst which has caused a flood in the Library.

We will have to wait for the everything to dry out and at least some of the flooring will have to be replaced.

On a brighter note, we were fortunate in that none of the stock appears to have been damaged.

As soon as we have more information on when we are likely to reopen we will let everyone know.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Web site of the month: QNI Heritage

In the early stages of her training, a trainee District Nurse (left) injects a diabetes-sufferer with insulin during a home visit. She is accompanied by a Sister (right), on her first rounds. The original caption states that "whilst they are with the patient the sister says nothing, but afterwards she gives nurse her criticism of the way she has handled the case".

Launched by the Queen's Nursing Institute, the QNI Heritage site explores the history of nursing in the community since 1859 when the very first district nurse was employed in England.

The site contains a large gallery of photos, audio files and films (dating from the 1930s to the 1970s), as well as a section of stories and articles revealing the experiences and lives of district nurses.

There are even a selection of "invalid recipes" and "ration recipes" (fricassee of tripe anyone?) taken from the pages of the Queen's Nurses' Magazine, as well as exam questions (from 1914-18 and 1948-58) with answers that give an interesting incite into the medical knowledge of the day.

The QNI Heritage site offers a fascinating look at the history of community nursing since its inception and with such a broad variety of content it is well worth a look.

New clinical overviews, journals and books added to Clinical Key

Clinical Overviews

Clinical Overviews are a quick and easy way to find evidence-based answers to your clinical questions.

Whenever you do a search in Clinical Key if there is a topic overview it will appear as the first result and also in a box on the right of the page.

Clinical Overviews are not book or journal content; they are concise, easily scannable summaries which include evidence-based information, current guidelines, and the latest advances on medical conditions. Clinical Overviews are tailored for clinicians.

The following topics have been added in Februrary:

• Cleft lip and palate
• Eosinophilic esophagitis
• Stomatitis

Journals

• AORN Journal 2018 to present
• Indian Pacing and Electrophysiology Journal 2014 to present
• Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine 2016 to present

Books

Elsevier have also added new electronic books to Clinical Key this month, including:

• Atlas of Orthoses and Assistive Devices (Webster, Joseph) 5th ed
• Complications in Neuroanesthesia (Prabhakar, Hemanshu) 1st ed; New to CK
• Diagnostic Immunohistochemistry (Dabbs, David) 5th ed
• Head and Neck Pathology (Thompson, Lester) 3rd ed
• Interventional Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (Shen, Bo) 1st ed; New to CK
• Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms and Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (Morgia, Giuseppe) 1st ed; New to CK
• Practical Soft Tissue Pathology: A Diagnostic Approach (Hornick, Jason) 2nd ed
• Practice of Anesthesia for Infants and Children (Cote, Charles) 6th ed
• Principles of Neurological Surgery (Ellenbogen, Richard) 4th ed
• Principles of Pulmonary Medicine (Weinberger, Steven) 7th ed
• Seidel’s Guide to Physical Examination (Ball, Jane) 9th 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

There is also a free app allowing you to access Clinical Key on the go.

To access Clinical Key all you need is your OpenAthens password (register online here if you don't have one) to get started.

Late opening at Isebrook Library, Tuesday the 13th of February

Isebrook library will not be open until 10.30 am on Tuesday the 13th of February.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Web site of the month: Twitter. A guide to searching for research purposes

As it has become ubiquitous, social media is a useful source of information, but how do you get the most from it when looking for information?

Produced by an NHS Librarian from the North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust and hosted on the NHS Networks site, this short guide looks at using Twitter as a source of reference and for research purposes.

The guide takes you through the different kinds of content you can find on Twitter and the tools you can use to organise your Twitter account and some techniques to make the best of them.

The guide also includes tips of how to best search Twitter to find the information you need, including using the advanced search options.

Finally it also shows you how to cite a Tweet if you need to include it in your bibliography.

IT problems at the Richmond Library

We have had significant IT issues at the Richmond Library recently since we replaced our public PCs with newer machines with Windows 10 installed.

This has led to some technical problems with them and has seen a number of our computers having to be taken away by IT and rebuilt, which has in turn impacted our users with less PCs being available.

We did not anticipate the move to newer computers with Windows 10 would cause as many problems as it has (we had trialled the system for a month at the Berrywood Library without incident).

IT are now taking the remaining PCs away in batches and reinstalling Windows 7 which we know was stable and not causing problems whilst they look for a permanent solution.

This should be completed shortly and we hope to have all of our PCs available again.

We now also have free WiFi access so you are able to bring your own devices into the library.

We understand this has caused problems for some of our users and would like to apologise for the inconvenience. IT are working hard on a solution and we hope to have normal services resumed soon.