Category: Library

Categories
Accident Prevention Alcohol Cancer Care of the Elderly Community Safety CVD CYP Healthcare Evidence Based Health Protection (Emergency planning Healthy Child including NCMP & CDO Healthy Settings Infant Feeding Infant Mortality Infection Control Library Liver Disease including NHS Health Checks Long-Term Conditions Respiratory Disease seasonal mortality) Tobacco & Drugs

Prescribing cannabis based drugs: response from NICE and Health Education England

I thought I would include this response from NICE and HEE as it is an important message. Click the link below to access the letter or read it below.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4940

Further to Hamilton’s recommendation that general practitioners consult Google Scholar and ask their colleagues if they are unsure about prescribing cannabis,1 we write to remind readers in England that they have 24/7 access to reliable sources of evidence to inform clinical decisions.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s evidence search (https://www.evidence.nhs.uk) provides access to authoritative evidence on health, social care, and public health. It focuses on synthesised secondary evidence, including content from over 800 sources, including the British National Formulary, Clinical Knowledge Summaries, SIGN, the Cochrane Library, the royal colleges, Public Health England, and GOV.UK. Information and knowledge specialists at NICE add further good quality systematic reviews. This service is openly available to everyone in the UK; here you will find reviews on the use of cannabis in treatment of epilepsy, neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, HIV/AIDS, and asthma.

Healthcare staff in England can access a vital, core collection of healthcare databases and full text journals for no charge at https://hdas.nice.org.uk. Purchased by Health Education England on behalf of the NHS in England, these are provided online in partnership with NICE. You simply need an NHS OpenAthens account. Register at https://www.nice.org.uk/about/what-we-do/evidence-services/journals-and-databases/OpenAthens.

NHS funded librarians and knowledge specialists are skilled in helping colleagues find information and search for evidence. They can offer summarised evidence searches and help teams keep up-to-date.

Health is a knowledge industry. We encourage practices to contact their local healthcare library. Check http://hlisd.org for details. Health Education England is committed to work with NHS organisations to ensure that all staff can access knowledge for healthcare23 and benefit from the expertise of healthcare librarians. We know that only a third of Clinical Commissioning Groups currently have such arrangements in place for their staff and member practices. For advice on improving your organisation’s access to knowledge services please contact your regional Health Education England library lead.3

 

Categories
Library

New Journals Available to Public Health Staff

This an update about  the PHE journal licence extension to local authority public health teams.

The current licences expire in December 2018. We are extending the licences for a further year, the new expiry date being 31 December 2019.

Click the following link to access all the PHE electronic journals you have free access to. You will need an Athens username to access these journals. Contact Sarah Woodhall for help.

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=athens&profile=eds&groupid=main

From January 2019 there are some new additions to the content, including:

Lancet Respiratory Medicine

Lancet Psychiatry

Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Chest

New Scientist

Wiley Medical and Nursing Collection – over 400 journals

Springer Nature – all Nature titles and package of Springer titles

Categories
Evidence Based Healthy Settings Library Licensing Planning Policy makers Public Health

Development of measurable indicators to enhance public health evidence-informed policy-making

Tudisca, V. et al. Health Research Policy and Systems, 2018: 16:47

Click here to access this article

Background
Ensuring health policies are informed by evidence still remains a challenge despite efforts devoted to this aim. Several tools and approaches aimed at fostering evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) have been developed, yet there is a lack of availability of indicators specifically devoted to assess and support EIPM. The present study aims to overcome this by building a set of measurable indicators for EIPM intended to infer if and to what extent health-related policies are, or are expected to be, evidence-informed for the purposes of policy planning as well as formative and summative evaluations.

Methods
The indicators for EIPM were developed and validated at international level by means of a two-round internet-based Delphi study conducted within the European project ‘REsearch into POlicy to enhance Physical Activity’ (REPOPA). A total of 82 researchers and policy-makers from the six European countries (Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, the United Kingdom) involved in the project and international organisations were asked to evaluate the relevance and feasibility of an initial set of 23 indicators developed by REPOPA researchers on the basis of literature and knowledge gathered from the previous phases of the project, and to propose new indicators.

Results
The first Delphi round led to the validation of 14 initial indicators and to the development of 8 additional indicators based on panellists’ suggestions; the second round led to the validation of a further 11 indicators, including 6 proposed by panellists, and to the rejection of 6 indicators. A total of 25 indicators were validated, covering EIPM issues related to human resources, documentation, participation and monitoring, and stressing different levels of knowledge exchange and involvement of researchers and other stakeholders in policy development and evaluation.

Conclusion
The study overcame the lack of availability of indicators to assess if and to what extent policies are realised in an evidence-informed manner thanks to the active contribution of researchers and policy-makers. These indicators are intended to become a shared resource usable by policy-makers, researchers and other stakeholders, with a crucial impact on fostering the development of policies informed by evidence.

Categories
Library

Health economics: a guide for public health teams

By Public Health England (2018)

Click here to view this guidance

Resources to help local commissioners achieve value for money by estimating the return on investment (ROI) and cost-effectiveness of public health programmes. There are various resources including:

The cost-effectiveness of specific topic areas

PHE’s Health Economics team has produced a number of resources which can be used to estimate the value of investing in prevention and early diagnosis in your area. They pull together the best available evidence on costs, savings, and health benefits for specific topic areas in a single place, thus simplifying the process of commissioning cost-effective services.

The interactive tools produced by PHE are:

Categories
Evidence Based Library Licensing Planning Public Health Advice to NHS Commissioners

Does access to a demand-led evidence briefing service improve uptake and use of research evidence by health service commissioners? A controlled before and after study

Wilson, P.M. et al. BMC Implementation Science, 2017; 12(20)

Click here to view this article

Abstract
Background
The Health and Social Care Act mandated research use as a core consideration of health service commissioning arrangements in England. We undertook a controlled before and after study to evaluate whether access to a demand-led evidence briefing service improved the use of research evidence by commissioners compared with less intensive and less targeted alternatives.

Methods
Nine Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in the North of England received one of three interventions: (A) access to an evidence briefing service; (B) contact plus an unsolicited push of non-tailored evidence; or (C) unsolicited push of non-tailored evidence. Data for the primary outcome measure were collected at baseline and 12 months using a survey instrument devised to assess an organisations’ ability to acquire, assess, adapt and apply research evidence to support decision-making. Documentary and observational evidence of the use of the outputs of the service were sought.

Results
Over the course of the study, the service addressed 24 topics raised by participating CCGs. At 12 months, the evidence briefing service was not associated with increases in CCG capacity to acquire, assess, adapt and apply research evidence to support decision-making, individual intentions to use research findings or perceptions of CCG relationships with researchers. Regardless of intervention received, participating CCGs indicated that they remained inconsistent in their research-seeking behaviours and in their capacity to acquire research. The informal nature of decision-making processes meant that there was little traceability of the use of evidence. Low baseline and follow-up response rates and missing data limit the reliability of the findings.

Conclusions
Access to a demand-led evidence briefing service did not improve the uptake and use of research evidence by NHS commissioners compared with less intensive and less targeted alternatives. Commissioners appear well intentioned but ad hoc users of research. Further research is required on the effects of interventions and strategies to build individual and organisational capacity to use research.

Categories
copyright critical appraisal Evidence Based Library

Public Health e-Learning toolkit

By UK Health Forum

Click here to use the toolkit

Public Health eLearning Toolkit (PHeLT) has been developed by qualified information professionals at the UK Health Forum, to support the public health workforce in using and appraising information in their work.
The PHeLT toolkit brings together a suite of resources to help you improve your skills in the areas of critical appraisal, understanding copyright, and ethical use of information, including correct referencing.

The aim of PHeLT is to save the public health workforce time in making effective use of the evidence by providing a single point of call for accessing resources to support the use of evidence. PHeLT is different from other elearning resources because it includes information on critical appraisal of grey literature, something that is not covered by other resources. An explanation of grey literature and it’s importance in public health is available in the FAQs section of the website.
PHeLT contains links only to existing, high quality resources on information skills such as referencing and critical appraisal. The majority of resources linked to from PHeLT have been made freely available by their publishers. However, the toolkits do contains some resources that are paid for, or require registration. This is indicated in the resource summary.

Categories
Evidence Based Library

Social systems evidence – a free to search repository of research evidence across a broad range of government sectors

Click here to view this resource

Social Systems Evidence is the world’s most comprehensive, continuously updated repository of syntheses of research evidence about the programs, services and products available in a broad range of government sectors and program areas (e.g., community and social services, culture and gender, economic development and growth, education, and transportation) as well as the governance, financial and delivery arrangements within which these programs, services and products are provided, and the implementation strategies that can help to ensure that these programs, services and products get to those who need them. The content contained in Social Systems Evidence covers most of the Sustainable Development Goals, with the exceptions of the health part of goal 3 (which is already well covered by Health Systems Evidence), most of goal 7 (energy), and all of goals 13-15 (climate, water and land).

The types of syntheses in Social Systems Evidence include evidence briefs for policy, overviews of systematic reviews, systematic reviews, systematic reviews in progress (i.e. protocols for systematic reviews), and systematic reviews being planned (i.e. registered titles for systematic reviews). Social Systems Evidence also contains a continuously updated repository of economic evaluations in these same domains. Documents included in Social Systems Evidence are identified through weekly electronic searches of online bibliographic databases (EBSCOhost, ProQuest and Web of Science) and through manual searches of the websites of high-volume producers of research syntheses relevant to social system program and service areas (see below acknowledgements). For all types of documents, Social Systems Evidence provides links to user-friendly summaries, scientific abstracts, and full-text reports (if applicable and when freely available). For each systematic review, Social Systems Evidence also provides an assessment of its methodological quality, and links to the studies contained in the review.

While SSE is free to use and does not require that users have an account, creating an account will allow you to view more than 20 search results, to save documents and searches, and to subscribe to email alerts, among other advanced features. You can create an account by clicking ‘Create account’ on the top banner (for desktop and laptop computers) or in the menu on far right of the banner (for mobile devices).

Social Systems Evidence can save social system policymakers and stakeholders a great deal of time by helping them to rapidly identify: a synthesis of the best available research evidence on a given topic that has been prepared in a systematic and transparent way, how recently the search for studies was conducted, the quality of the synthesis, the countries in which the studies included in the synthesis were conducted, and the key findings from the synthesis. Social Systems Evidence can also help them to rapidly identify economic evaluations in these same domains.

Categories
Evidence Based Library Licensing Planning

The need for a complex systems model of evidence for public health

The Lancet, Vol 390, Issue 10112 Pages 2527-2604

Click here to view this article

Categories
Library

NHS Health Checks – Literature reviews

Categories
Library

Can’t find it? Let us help! New quick and easy access to evidence for local authority public health teams!

Free online training – click on the dates below to book 

Over 1300 full text journals purchased by PHE and the NHS national core content collection of journals is soon to be quickly and easily accessible to you in just one search, through provision of a new dedicated discovery service.

The bespoke discovery service, which will be available to you from 28 September, enables you to search across a range of quality public health research evidence using a single search box, with the same ease as you would a search-engine, yet with the assurance that you are browsing high quality, relevant resources. Better still, you benefit from seamless access to the full text without the need to go to multiple publisher websites or platforms.

It’s easy to use, and saves you time. You will be able to find the evidence you need to inform your professional decision-making. To find out more, use the links below to register for a free online introductory training session, to be held:

Don’t worry if you can’t make either of the above dates, you will be able to view a recording at your own convenience after 28 September.

Need some help? Email: libraries@phe.gov.uk or Telephone: (020) 368 20600