BNF now available to NHS staff via "Medicines Complete"

The BNF is a fundamental tool for healthcare staff.
You can access it using your NHS ATHENS login

• login to MyATHENS, click "resources", and "local resources", and scroll down to "Medicines Complete"
• or www.medicinescomplete.com and sign in with NHS ATHENS login

Easter Holiday

The Medical Library will be shut Friday 6th April - Monday 9th April inclusive.

Library services will resume at 8.00am, Tuesday 10th April 2012.

Iain Chalmers - Radio4's Life Scientifc

"Jim Al-Khalili talks to the pioneering health services researcher, Iain Chalmers, who was one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration.
Once described by one writer as 'The Maverick Master of Medical Evidence'. Iain Chalmers trained as a doctor, eventually specialising in obstetrics. But early in his career, he started to question the basis of everything he was trained to do and this set him on a very different path: to champion treatments based on the best available evidence, first in his own field and then across healthcare. It's a journey that has at times challenged the foundations of medical practice.
In 1992, he was appointed Director of the Cochrane Centre, which led to the foundation of the Cochrane Collaboration, dedicated to ensuring that patients, doctors and researchers have access to unbiased information about the effectiveness of healthcare interventions, across the world."

Listen again - to Radio 4's Life Scientific

• Cochrane Collaboration (www.cochrane.org)
• James Lind Alliance (www.lindalliance.org)

 

Online Payment of Fines

Books returned or renewed late have a fine levied at 25p per book per day.

No one likes having to pay a library fine for returning books late, but at least we can make it easy for you.

Now we accept payment by debit or credit card,
as well as cash. 

Pay Fines Online

Please note:

• Registration with the Online Store is necessary
• Enter the exact amount when prompted, as refunds are not possible
• Minimum online payment is £5
• Fines will be cleared from your library record by the next working day - you will be notified by email
• Secure online payment system is managed by University of Cambridge Online Store 
  
  
  
  

Photo from taxbrackets.org
flickr: Images_of_Money 

What's it like to be a patient in a clinical trial?

Clinical trials are the gold standard method of testing the effectiveness of an intervention. When done well (ie randomised, crossed over, blinded, with sufficient power, and appropriate outcome measures) they can provide a very solid basis for evidence based practice.

But what's it like to be a patient in a trial?
- not knowing whether you're taking the drug or the sugar pill?
- what questions should a patient ask a trial co-ordinator before they consent?
- what if you're consenting for your child to take part?

HealthTalkOnline.org (www.healthtalkonline.org/) provides an insight. It "lets you share in other people's experiences of health and illness. This information is based on qualitative research into patient experiences led by experts at the University of Oxford"

Read about or listen to patients experience of biobanking and participating in clinical trials.
What about the patient perspective of share decision making?
Learn about the patient perspective and experience on a range of other conditions.

Follow them on twitter, or learn more about HealthTalkOnline:

4 New E-journal Titles are accessible

The library has subscribed to :-

• Circulation:arrhythmia and electrophysiology - link
• Circulation:Cardiovascular quality and outcomes - link

Both are available from university computers or remotely by using RAVEN, (for university readers).

• Regional anesthesia and pain medicine - uni link or nhs link
• Current opinion in critical care - uni link or nhs link

Both are available from university computers or remotely using either RAVEN (for university readers,) or NHS Athens, (for NHS readers). See ejournals@cambridge for more information and access.

Podcasts from PodMedics

With a glowing review from iMedicalApps, ("Podmedics brings superb medical education podcasts to junior doctors and med students") it might be worth exploring PodMedics: http://podmedics.com/

Created by UK foundation doctor Ed Wallitt (@PodmedicsEd)
these podcasts cover an excellent range of specialties available ranging from Cardiology to Rheumatology, with extra sections dedicated to Surgery, Clinical Specialties and Clinical Sciences.

There's space for you to make your own notes, and as well as audio there's visuals to keep you interested too.

The downside: £30 per year for full access (7 day free trial)

Podmedics 4 Teaser from Edward Wallitt on Vimeo.

Podcasts from Cochrane Library

Want to keep up to date with new Cochrane Systematic reviews, but no time?
Then try podcasts:
The latest issue (January 2012) has podcasts on such diverse topics as

• Disposable surgical face masks for preventing surgical wound infection in clean surgery
• Exercise interventions for smoking cessation
• Self-monitoring of blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus who are not using insulin

Previous  editions of Cochrane are also available as podcasts so why not listen yourself happy?

New new e-books: includes Kumar & Clark, Robbins & Cotran

books@cambridge are pleased to announce that trial access is now available to eight important medical e-textbooks on the Elsevier E-Textbooks platform.

Titles include those such as Rang & Dale’s Pharmacology (7th edition), Kumar and Clark’s Clinical Medicine, and Robbins & Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease. Medical students, particularly those on placement, may find these e-textbooks of considerable interest.


Access to the trial is available both on- and off-campus from the following link: http://tinyurl.com/ebookstrial and from the link on the ebooks@cambridge collections web page. From off-campus users will need to use their Raven password.

The Bookshelf feature displays those titles available to read and search in full-text, and users can print from those texts. Users can also register individually on the platform to create a saved space in which notes, bookmarks and highlights can be added.

***

Trial access is available from 

Monday 23rd January 2012 

to 15 March 2012.

***

We would welcome your comments, please send your feedback to the ebooks@cambridge team at the UL, either by reply or to ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Further details are available from the e-books blogpost .

 

NHS Right Care

The NHS Right Care programme (http://www.rightcare.nhs.uk) is focussed on increasing value – value for patients and value for commissioners. The programme is targeted at clinicians, commissioners and patients and has five workstreams:

•    Population Planning and Programme Budgeting
•     Clinical Networks and Systems of Care
•     Better Value Clinical Practice
•     Shared Decision Making
•     Population Medicine

The right care team is led by Sir Muir Gray, Chief Knowledge Officer of the NHS, DH; Philip DaSilva, National QIPP Lead, Primary & Community Services and Dr Steve Laitner, Lead for Shared Decision Making.

As well as hosting the NHS Atlas of Variation series (the 2011 edition is now available), there is stacks of information around shared decision making, including slidesets, videos and reading lists



Internet-Informed Patient Symposium - Dr Steven Laitner from School of Clinical Medicine on Vimeo

New e-book - Harrison's online

The library has subscribed to Harrison's online for a year, which covers the complete contents of "Harrison's principles and practice of medicine" 18th ed.

It allows printing and mobile downloading in a format optimised for handheld devices such as smartphones. Also incorporated are more than 90 videos, 1000 self assessment questions and answers, plus expert presentations.

See http://ezproxy.lib.cam.ac.uk:2048/login?url=http://www.accessmedicine.com

It is accessible using the library computers, or remotely using a university RAVEN username and password.

Other major e-books to which the library subscribes include:-

Oxford textbook of medicine

http://otm.oxfordmedicine.com/contents.dtl

Oxford textbook of palliative care http://otpallm.oxfordmedicine.com/

Library closed over Christmas

The Medical Library will be closed over the Christmas period, from 12.30pm Friday 23rd December.

We reopen in the New Year: 8am on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.

We wish Library Users a very merry Christmas,

with all best wishes for the New Year.

2011 BMA Book Award

Congratulations to Dr Peter Baxter, Consultant Physician in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust for winning a BMA book award: medicine category. He is an editor of "Hunter's diseases of occupations" 10th edition.

This is held in the Library as a reference book at WA 400.62

Deduplication of Journals

Work continues with the deduplication of journal titles which are found in other Cambridge University libraries. One set will continue to be housed in one of the University libraries.

The list of the journals involved is:

Title	Start	vol		End	vol	Retained copy
MIMS magazine	1974		to	1987		UL
Monthly Bulletin of the Ministry of Health and the (Emergency) Public Health Laboratory Service	1951	10	to	1967	26	UL
Nursing Mirror	1980	151	to	1985	161	UL
Science	1946	103	to	1999	286	CSL

Please email library@medschl.cam.ac.uk if you wish to comment on this.

Kings Fund - The point of care: accepting death & illness

The Kings Fund seeks to understand how the health system in England can be improved.
One of it's current projects is The Point of Care Programme which aims to help health care staff in hospitals deliver the quality of care they would want for themselves and their own families.

This section includes staff stories, and 2 have come recently from a 2nd year medical student who considers Accepting death and illness as a doctor and as a patient and Patients: just a tool for medical learning?
 

Changes to Library closing time

Owing to changes in the Clinical School building closing procedures, Medical Library patrons please note the following:

        Last entry to the Clinical School building and Medical Library:

        9.35pm Monday to Friday

        4.35pm Saturday

Medical Library services will cease:

                9.45pm Monday to Friday
                4.45pm Saturday

Medical Library will close:

                9.50pm Monday to Friday

                4.50pm Saturday

Effective from Monday 3^rd October 2011

We apologise for any inconvenience these changes may cause.

Welcome to New Clinical Students

Welcome to the new cohort of Clinical Students 2011. 

We hope you'll have a wonderful 3 years, 

and offer you any support we can from the Medical Library.

Prodigy - the new face of Clinical Knowlege Summaries (CKS)

Do you remember Clinical Knowledge Summaries - a great source of high quality summaries of evidence and "practical know how" about common conditions in primary care.

CKS is now rebranded as PRODIGY, and is back, better than ever. Search for a specific topic, or browse the clinical topics. High quality patient information is also available.

http://www.prodigy.clarity.co.uk

PRODIGY is an accredited  provider for NHS Evidence, and its content is also retrievable when you search TRIP.

A leaflet about Prodigy is available too.

Reading Lists

What are students at University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine expected to be reading?
Check out the reading lists now.

Library redevelopment - work in week beginning 5th September

Activities in the library this week include:

• Monday 5th, Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th

Re-carpeting of the area between the Reception area and the Books.

This will be noisy and disruptive work, and we apologise for the inevitable inconvenience.

• Thursday and Friday

No work scheduled. Calm!