World Evidence-Based Healthcare Day 2021
Published Date: 20th October 2021
Today (20th October) is World Evidence-Based Healthcare Day. You can find out more about the campaign here: https://worldebhcday.org/ but we’re going to celebrate the day by blowing our own trumpet and tell you some of the ways your Library and Knowledge Service can help you ensure that that your practice is based on the best, most up to date evidence.
Keeping up to date with the latest information is hard to do at the best of time, but is extra hard with COVID. Everyone is twice as busy and there is three times as much to read – new guidelines, new reports, new research results…
Our current awareness service, the Knowledge Alerts brings you the latest information, selected from reliable sources, and delivered straight to your inbox. The Alerts can be tailored by you, so that you only receive alerts on the topics that you choose. You can sign up for Knowledge Alerts using your NHS OpenAthens account here: https://www.knowledge-nw.nhs.uk/knowledge.
If you don’t yet have an NHS OpenAthens account, you can register online here: https://openathens.nice.org.uk/.
The rapid response of the healthcare community to the COVID pandemic has resulted in a large amount of information being published, but this has also been accompanied by a surge of misinformation, creating what has been termed by the World Health Organisation as an infodemic.
Picking out the useful information from amongst the disinformation can be hard and take time that you don’t have. The Library and Knowledge Service can help you improve and develop your critical appraisal skills, helping to build your confidence when reading and interpreting journal articles and news stories. On our Critical Appraisal webpages you will find links to a range of resources on evidence-based medicine, critical appraisal, research design and understanding statistics. We also offer practical group and one-to-one training on critically appraising a paper (currently via MS-Teams) to book a session, or learn more, email the library at: library@sthk.nhs.uk.
The Library and Knowledge Service also provides access to all of the online resources and materials that you need. Through our website and using your NHS OpenAthens account you can access over 5,000 online journals, many medical databases and a selection of Point of Care Tools including UpToDate and BMJ Best Practice. You can find all of these and more on the My Resources Pages here: https://www.knowledge-nw.nhs.uk/resources.
If you need help accessing these resources, or want to learn how to find the best evidence for yourself, we offer one-to-one training sessions via MS Teams. There are help guides available on our Information Skills pages but if you don’t have time to search through the databases to find the evidence you need, then we offer an evidence search service. An experienced librarian will do the searching for you, finding the evidence and articles you need and emailing the results. See our Find the Evidence page to find out more or to request a search.
And last, but most definitely not least, if you can’t get full text access to the journal article you need, you can send in a request and let us find a copy for you: https://www.knowledge-nw.nhs.uk/request-an-article.