NHS Evidence (provided by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, NICE) was launched in April 2009 with the aim to provide “easy access to high quality clinical and non-clinical information about health and social care”; and also provide access to 34 specialist collections which cover a wide range of medical conditions and topics. The specialist collections (SC’s) were formerly part of the National Library for Health.
Each SC is a web based collection of linked resources, and makes sure to include the best available evidence in that particular speciality. Collections are maintained by information specialists, a clinical lead (who is a senior practitioner in the field of the SC) and input from a national reference group (representatives from relevant professional organisations, institutions and charities in the field of women’s health who offer guidance in the development of the collection). In the women’s health SC we also have a team of clinical fellows who are responsible for one area of the collection, and offer advice from a clinical viewpoint.
One of the most important (and clinically useful) roles of the SC’s is to produce an ‘Annual Evidence Update’ (AEU) on different subjects within their collection. At the moment, the women’s health SC produces five (with the aim to publish a new ‘Diabetes and Pregnancy’ AEU next year) in the areas of ‘Antenatal care’, ‘Heavy Menstrual Bleeding’, ‘Endometriosis’, ‘Urinary Incontinence’ (held jointly with the kidney diseases and male urogenital SC) and ‘Dysmenorrhoea’. The purpose of AEU’s is to provide a concise overview of new research and evidence that has been published over the last twelve months, and provide summaries and references. Each AEU can take weeks (if not, months) to prepare. In depth search strategies need to be written to catch all possible evidence; results need to be filtered down to a manageable number and of high quality; clinical fellows and medical students need to be organised to write the summaries for each chapter of the AEU; and lastly, editing and finalising of the whole project. It can take a lot of time!
For an example, please see our latest AEU which was ‘Antenatal and Pregnancy Care’ published in September.
The AEU is a good example of the specialist nature of medical librarianship and information management, and goes to show that there are plenty of avenues in the field of library and information management; not just the traditional concept of books!
Hi Sarah,
Many thanks for your post- sounds really interesting. I was just wondering if your library finds it hard to keep up-to-date with all the new medical advances and publications. I know working somewhere as large as the Bod there is often a significant delay between when we receive material and when it finally reaches the shelf. For us this might mean a few unhappy academics but I suppose in a medical library it is really important to be processing new material and making it available to your readers.
Will be interested to hear your thoughts!
We’re an electronic, online library so it is much easier for us to keep up-to-date than I imagine it is for you at the Bodleian! There are a few ways for us to add content to the collection.
Firstly, we can scan various websites frequently for newly published material (for example, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists or the Department of Health), and link to it directly from the website. Generally, as soon as a resource is published, it will most likely be in the collection within a month at a maximum (it depends how busy we are!)
Secondly, we are emailed a list of new resources the central team at NHS Evidence have imported from databases (for the previous month), such as the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) or NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NEED). We will then choose which are relevant to our collection, and link them.
We link to all resources from a ‘resource management software’ (RMS) wherein we can create entries from scratch, or create a link to existing ones.
We do try and keep up-to-date as much as possible, and in the medical world where research and evidence is published so fast, it’s important to constantly keep checking for new resources!