Quality and Productivity Specialist Collection launched

NHS Evidence specialist collections aim to provide access to the best available evidence. From them, you can link to the latest guidelines, systematic reviews and research in your area of interest.

A new specialist collection has just been launched, providing a central resource for evidence on how to improve quality and productivity in the NHS.

Visit the website for more information

RCP - Guidance on antibiotics is too specialist for most doctors

18 Nov - Existing guidance on the management of some infections may be too long and complex for many doctors to have time to absorb, according to the Healthcare-Associated Infections (HCAI) Working Group at the RCP. The group have now produced a handy one-page summary of guidelines to help busy doctors identify what is most important for them in their routine clinical practice. The Effective Antibiotic Prescribing Top Ten Tips aims to help doctors use antibiotics safely while protecting their patients and public health. In order to prevent a rise in drug-resistant bacteria, doctors should prescribe the shortest course of treatment that is likely to be effective and antibiotic policies should be based on local data, in addition to national and international information, to help detect patterns of resistance in bugs. Commenting on the new guidance note, the Chair of the RCP’s HCAI Working Group, Professor Jon Friedland said: “Antibiotics are essential to modern medicine and may be life-saving, but their abuse leads to resistance. Doctors are ideally placed to take the lead on managing infection control promoting best practice, sharing knowledge and ensuring that the understanding of infection and antibiotic prescribing are a mandatory part of training.” © Royal College of Physicians of London

• Effective Antibiotic Prescribing Top Ten Tips

NICE seeks outstanding NHS professionals for its new Fellows and Scholars programme

5 Nov - NICE is launching the new Fellows and Scholars programme, aimed at providing more chances for NHS public health and clinical professionals in England to work with NICE. The new programme will create opportunities for NHS staff to undertake projects and work with the Institute to improve the quality of care within their local health communities. A wide range of staff, including public health and allied health professionals, doctors, nurses, and health service managers, are encouraged to apply. © National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
· Full press release
· NICE Fellows and Scholars

PubMed redesigned

This week, a new design for PubMed has been launched.

Library staff can offer you training and advice on how to make the most of the redesigned database, contact us on info.skills@medsch.ucl.ac.uk

Major consultation on the successor to the RAE

HEFCE has published a consultation, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, on the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF is the new process for assessing research in UK higher education institutions, enabling the selective allocation of funding. It will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

For further information see the HEFCE website.

UpToDate now available in the library

UpToDate is now available from one of the walk-in computers in the library - ask at the issue desk for the login for Walk-in PC 1.

UpToDate is an electronic resource providing detailed answers to clinical questions based on the best available evidence. It is written by clinicians and covers more than 7,700 topics in 14 medical specialties. If you are looking for high quality evidence to inform your clinical practice, come to the library to see if UpToDate has the answers.

New current awareness website available: Clinical Reader

A new current awareness website has just been launched to help you keep up to date with the latest research. The site is still in beta form, which means there may be more improvements to come.

http://clinicalreader.com

The site describes itself thus:

"At this moment, high impact research and health news articles are scattered across hundreds of sites. That´s far too much for any reader to follow.Welcome to Clinical Reader, a truly quality collection of accessible clinical, scientific and health literature aiming to ease information delivery to the medical community. Focus your time, discover new links, fine-tune your online experience in a bid to effectively manage online clinical browsing. Our regularly updated content features the latest articles from high impact factor and popular journals, health news sources and prime multimedia content. Headlines are swiftly visualized and seamlessly linked to abstract or full content articles to keep our community aware of current research, trends and analysis. Login with Athens to further enhance your online experience."

Let us know what you think of this resource

Who's Who and Who Was Who

UCL now subscribes to the electronic versions of Who’s Who and Who Was Who.

Who’s Who contains over 33,000 short biographies, continually updated, of living noteworthy and influential individuals, from all walks of life, worldwide.
The first edition of Who Was Who contained the entries from Who’s Who of those who had died between 1897 and 1915 with the date of death added to each. Subsequent volumes of Who Was Who — there are now eleven — cover the years from 1916 to 2005.

There is a link to Who’s Who and Who Was Who on UCL Library Services’ databases list.

Bank holiday opening hours - Monday 25 May 2009

The Royal Free Hospital Medical Library will be open on bank holiday Monday 25 May 2009, from 10.00am - 5.00pm.

Resources on Swine flu

The Royal Free Medical Library has compiled a list of links to information and web resources on Swine Influenza (A/H1N1). Sources include:

Collections of information / summaries of evidence
Guidance and clinical guidelines
Original articles
General and patient information
News and blogs

If you have suggestions for further resources to be added, please contact Angela Young.

Bank holiday opening hours - Monday 4 May 2009

The Royal Free Hospital Medical Library will be open on bank holiday Monday 4 May 2009, from 10.00am - 5.00pm.

Royal Free Library Easter 2009 opening hours

• Monday 6th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Tuesday 7th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Wednesday 8th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Thursday 9th April 2009: 10am-5pm
• Friday 10th April - Monday 13th April 2009 inclusive: CLOSED
• Tuesday 14th April 2009: 10am-5pm
• Wednesday 15th April 2009: 9am-10pm & return to normal opening hours

New training timetable now available

A new timetable of information skills training sessions from the Medical Library for April to August 2009 is now available.


We offer sessions on literature searching using health and medical databases, resources for evidence-based practice, critical appraisal of a journal article and using Reference Manager software to organise and cite your references. If you are a researcher, why not come to our 'Assessing the impact of your research' session, where you can learn to use resources that provide citation data, such as times cited and your h-index.

We also offer library inductions on a drop-in basis on Wednesday afternoons at 3.00pm. For more information see the library's information skills training web pages.

EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service)

EThOS is a new British Library service aimed at providing digital copies of UK PhD theses direct to the researcher, over the web. It is a database containing over 250,000 UK theses with the added functionality to enable the requesting of digital copies of selected theses.

Researchers do not need to be registered with the system to search the database, but will need to register if they wish to request a digital copy of a thesis.

Many of the participating UK institutions support Open Access to their theses, so downloads of these digital and digitised theses are free to the researcher. UCL is an Open Access sponsor.

Where a thesis must be digitised before supply, there will be a short delay before it is accessible. However, the requester will be informed when the thesis is available and can then log on to the system and download the thesis. The theses are supplied as zipped pdfs. Alternative formats (CD or paper) are also available for purchase.

EThOS can only offer the theses of participating institutions. Whilst it is expected that a large number of institutions will participate, the British Library cannot supply from an institution which chooses not to. In this case, it may be possible to obtain a copy via UCL Library Services' Inter Library Loan Service. A list of participating institutions is available at http://ethos.bl.uk/HEIList.do

There is an FAQs page and if you have any other queries about the service, contact the ILDS office at interloans@ucl.ac.uk

EThOS was launched in January 2009 and is currently in Beta phase. Over the coming months you will see enhancements to the service.

BMJ Best Practice

UCL has a trial of BMJ Best Practice until 11 March 2009.

Best Practice, part of the BMJ Evidence Centre, is a decision support tool that combines the latest research evidence with guidelines and expert opinion. It takes a patient-centred approach that covers diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and prevention in step-by-step stages.

Please send feedback on the BMJ Best Practice trial to ejournals@ucl.ac.uk. Feedback helps librarians assess the importance of new resources.

• Access the BMJ Best Practice trial
• Trial expires: 11 March 2009

Circulation journals and MIDIRS Midwifery Digest

UCL now has access to six circulation-related journals from the American Heart Association, published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins:

Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology
Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics
Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging
Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions
Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes
Circulation: Heart Failure

UCL now also has access to MIDIRS Midwifery Digest.

All of these titles are accessible via the ejournals list.

E-books project - your chance to take part!

The JISC national e-books observatory project currently provides staff and students with free access to a collection of electronic books via the MyiLibrary platform. A full list of the books included in the project can be found at:http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/wp-content/full-list-of-e-books-oct-2007b.doc (medical titles are listed on last page).

The aim of the project is to find out more about usage, promotion and purchasing of e-books in academic libraries. For more information on the project go to http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/
Staff and students are invited to take part in a focus group about the electronic books provided as part of this project. Participating students from around 14 institutions (including UCL) will be entered into a prize draw to win one of 6 prizes of £100. If you are a student or member of staff at UCL and would be interested in taking part in these focus groups please contact Kate Cheney.

New training timetable now available

A new timetable of information skills training sessions from the Medical Library for January to March 2009 is now available. We offer various sessions, covering literature searching using health and medical databases, the use of evidence-based resources, critical appraisal of a journal article and using Reference Manager software to organise and cite your references.

New for 2009 is a session on assessing the impact of your research, where you can learn to use resources that provide citation data, such as times cited and your h-index. We also now offer library inductions on a drop-in basis on Wednesday afternoons at 3.00pm.

For more information see the library's information skills training web pages.