Developing a generic tool to routinely measure the impact of health libraries.

Background: Health libraries contribute to many activities of a health care organisation. Impact assessment needs to capture that range of contributions.

Objectives: To develop and pilot a generic impact questionnaire that: (1) could be used routinely across all English NHS libraries; (2) built on previous impact surveys; and (3) was reliable and robust.

Measuring the impact of information skills training: a survey of health libraries in England.

Background: The lack of robust research measuring the impact of NHS based information skills training prompted the West Midlands Regional Trainers' Forum to conduct a post-training survey.

Methods: This is a multi-centred study which collected data from over 60 separate organisations. Survey questionnaires were completed by learners a few weeks after the training event.

Are e-cigarettes a safer alternative to smoking?

Smokers appear to be using electronic cigarettes in attempts to quit but the products are currently unregulated. This article explores evidence regarding electronic nicotine delivery devices--usually known as e-cigarettes--and how this relates to clinical practice. It also discusses secondary care smoking cessation services in the light of NICE guidance.

Improving the quality of hospital discharge summaries utilising an electronic prompting system.

The discharge summary (DS) is a summary of an inpatient admission, patient's health state, and future treatment plans which is delivered to the patient's primary care provider. The DS is often incomplete, inaccurate, or unclear. The aim of this project was to improve the quality of the DS through the use of an electronic prompting system.

Improving the efficiency of discharge summary completion by linking to preexisiting patient information databases.

The discharge summary (DS) is a document that contains the diagnosis, comorbidities, procedures, complications, and future treatment plan for a particular patient after an inpatient hospital stay. The DS is completed by junior medical staff and is delivered to the general practitioner (GP). DS completion is time consuming and tedious, and DSs are usually not completed within the recommended time frame after a patient is discharged.

Are therapeutic decisions made on the medical admissions unit any more evidence-based than they used to be?

Rationale, Aims And Objectives: To determine whether inpatients in a medical admissions unit in a UK district general hospital received evidence-based therapies in 2008.

Methods: The diagnoses of and therapies received by inpatients at the George Eliot Hospital National Health Service Trust in Nuneaton were recorded. A clinical librarian searched the literature (Clinical Knowledge Summaries, Cochrane Library, Medline and Embase) for the best evidence for each diagnosis-therapy pair.