NHS England has published Next steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View. This document reviews the progress made since the launch of the NHS Five Year Forward View in October 2014 and sets out a series of practical and realistic steps for the NHS to deliver a better, more joined-up service with the aim of a more responsive NHS in England in the future.
News
Keep up to date with library news, and new developments in health information resources and services
Searching for qualitative studies in CINAHL
Qualitative research can help to understand the human experience of health and illness, and is an important part of evidence-based healthcare. Qualitative research can use various methods, such as grounded theory, phenomenology, or focus groups.
However, it is not always easy to identify qualitative studies in the literature.
Work has been done to create search strategies to locate these studies in the CINAHL database (covering nursing and allied health) and these can help to reduce the potential number of references to review.
If you're searching CINAHL using the NHS Healthcare Databases, this is an example strategy that can be copied and pasted into the search box:
exp ATTITUDE/ OR exp INTERVIEWS/ OR exp "QUALITATIVE STUDIES"/
Once the search is complete, carry out a search for your topic of interest, and then combine the searches together.
If you're searching CINAHL using EBSCOHost (either via OmniSearch, or using Staffordshire University resources), the strategy to use is:
(MH "Attitude+") OR (MH "Interviews+") OR (MH "Qualitative Studies+")
Copy and paste the strategy into the search box and run the search. Once the search is complete, carry out a search for your topic of interest, and then combine the searches together (you'll need to visit the search history to combine searches).
These searches are fairly 'sensitive' and will pick up most articles that are qualitative research, but will include some that are not. However, they will vastly reduce the number of non-qualitative research articles in your results and make it easier to find qualitative research.
Searching for Economic Evaluations in Healthcare
Are you looking for information on the cost effectiveness of different treatments, or cost-benefit analyses? Published economic evaluations are a good place to start, but they're not always easy to find in the literature, so below are some suggestions for places to look and ways to search for them.
Once you've found an economic evaluation, you could use the CASP Economic Evaluation Checklist to critically appraise it.
CEA Registry
The CEA (Cost Effectiveness Analysis) Registry is a collection of over 5,500 articles containing cost-utility analyses.
NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED)
The NHS Economic Evaluation Database (EED) contains details of articles containing economic evaluations of healthcare interventions. It covers the period up to the end of 2014 (sadly, it is no longer being updated with new information)
It can be searched via the Cochrane Library, and results are shown in the 'Economic Evaluations' section of the results list.
Medline
Medline is a very comprehensive database, with coverage of all areas of medicine, including nursing, allied health, public health and mental health.
Economic evaluations can be found by using a search strategy such as this one for Medline:
(ec).fs OR (cost).ti OR exp *"HEALTH CARE COSTS"/ OR exp *"COSTS AND COST ANALYSIS"/
Copy and paste this into the search box and run the search, then carry out your subject search and combine the two. More strategies can be found on the McMaster University website but they will need to be adapted for the NHS databases.
EMBASE
Excepta Medica (EMBASE) covers all aspects of medicine, nursing, allied health, health policy, and public health. It is particularly strong on pharmaceutical information, and has an emphasis on European literature.
Economic evaluations can be found by using a search strategy such as this one for EMBASE:
exp *"COST EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS"/ OR exp *"ECONOMIC EVALUATION"/ OR (cost).ti OR (economic).ti,ab
Copy and paste this into the search box and run the search, then carry out your subject search and combine the two. More strategies can be found on the McMaster University website but they will need to be adapted for the NHS databases.
Developing People - Improving Care
NHS Improvement recently published the paper Developing People - Improving Care Strategic Framework: A national framework for action on improvement and leadership development in NHS-funded services.
This strategy focuses on developing improvement skills and leadership capabilities in the NHS, and covers areas such as:
- Systems leadership for staff who are working with partners in other local services
- Quality improvement methods that draw on staff and service users’ knowledge and experience
- Inclusive and compassionate leadership, so that all staff are listened to, understood and supported, and that leaders at every level of the health system truly reflect the talents and diversity of people working in the system and the communities they serve
- Talent management to support NHS-funded services to fill senior current vacancies and future leadership pipelines with the right numbers of diverse, appropriately developed people
The strategy will help the NHS to develop capability and capacity to deliver the Five Year Forward Plan and Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs).
What Source When? Producing Reliable Patient Information
When writing health information for patients and service users, using reliable sources and evidence is key to ensuring it is high quality and can be trusted.
What's the most appropriate source to use for producing health content? The Patient Information Forum (PIF) has published a factsheet called 'What source when? Creating realiable and accurate information', that provides an introduction to the difference sources of evidence that exist, and considers what sort of source you might want to use for different sorts of health content.
- Sons worst affected by smoking in pregnancy - studyData from half-a-million people was assessed by the University of Aberdeen research team.
- Children under eight should avoid drinking slushies, doctors warnPaediatricians studied 21 children in the UK and Ireland who became very ill after the icy drinks.
- NHS to offer take-at-home tablet for MSBroadening access to cladribine should help more patients avoid hospital and free up clinic time.
- Thousands miss NHS screenings due to admin errorRoutine screening invitations were not sent because of an error dating back to 2008.
- Annual jab for HIV protection passes trial hurdleLenacapavir, which stops HIV from replicating inside cells, has passed early safety tests.