Right across the parking lot. Open and staffed 7 days a week. 8- 11:45 weekdays, 9-6 Sat and 1 – 11:45 Sundays. Computer labs, group and inidividual study rooms. No food or lounge.
High use by health care providers. Need access key to enter during evenings and weekends.
Wonderful space behind hospital next to Human Resources. Open M-F business hours only. No off hours access.
So the health information – and questions about us are all around us every day. Its so great to be in this beautiful new building with wireless reception. Makes life convenient, doesn’t it. Have you heard anything about the connection between wireless routers and increased severe headaches? Perhaps that’s the next workplace hazard. Or what about this scenario. As new parents and students, the last thing you have time for is a sick child. Should you get your infant vaccinated against the swine flu? Didn’t you hear something about mercury in the vaccine being harmful to children? What are some of the challenges you face when you look for information to answer your questions? And that is just anecdotal – for your own interests. What about school research? How about job related?
As undergraduates in a biomedical tract, there are may directions you can take your education in: What if you start working as a research assistant to pay for graduate school and you need to find some case studies for a grant your lab is working on. Where would you go? What about the research project you have to complete? Can you refine your topic and find vetted sources of information? How do you keep track of the information you do find?
Even once you think you get comfortable with the tools, there are still inherent challenges. There are many different types of information from so many sources – most of it electronic- how can you be sure what you find is authoratative?
You have decided to go into the medical field. Well, doctors are really smart people, aren’t they? They are really busy people, aren’t they? Their time is valuable. How do they keep up to date with the information they need for practice, especially in specialization? This epidemiologist needs to read how many days out of the month? 26?
Nurses are counted on to know best practices necessary for safe and efficient patient care rely on research that has already been reviewed for them, but nonetheless these reviews are still sizable reports. Statistics tell us in addition to working their shift, nurses need to make time to read 20 of these reports a week if they are to stay current.
We have seen some phenomenal advances in biomedical research in the past three decades. Imagine the research that must go into developing the next best drug or device. The internet has advanced the dissemination of knowledge – that is certain – but the internet has been compared to a giant bookstore where all the book jackets have been torn off and all books thrown on the floor in a big pile. Are you looking for something special? Something to solve a life and death dilemma? Go and find it. Good luck.
What type of information are your seeking and what is the diffence?
How does all of this translate to the medical literature? Much original research goes on.
Then researchers and health care providers look at the original research and evaluate it. Maybe it is brought to market, maybe to practice, maybe not
And when they do get the information, how do they know it is vetted – safe- written and reviewed by educated ethical competent people? Here are two articles indexed in Pubmed about the information one can find on the internet. The first study demonstrated that information retrieved by the public on head injury from non-medical websites may be incomplete and inaccurate. It also identified website characteristics associated with poor content quality. So how do you evaluate the sites you find on the internet giving you medical information? Are the claims true or bogus? What criteria do you use to decide? The second article reports on some of the “instruments used to evaluate health information that exists on the Internet. It is unclear, however, whether they should exist in the first place, whether they measure what they claim to measure, or whether they lead to more good than harm.
In this third study, the co nclusion reported that the overall quality of website information about osteoarthritis was poor. Medical search engines need to incorporate – an important term here - evidence-based medicine and, one of the main obstacles to the Internet reaching its potential as a medical resource is the failure of websites to incorporate and attribute evidence-based information.
You will be hearing a lot about evidence based medicine in the years ahead as you advance in your studies. Simplified, EBP is a combination of what the patient wants combined with the doctor’s expertise which is strengthened by evidence from the research. When you are trying to decide if your pediatrician is making the right recommendation when he advises you to inoculate your infant against the H1N1 flu, you will be hoping he has done his recent reading, and isn’t still reading journal articles from two years ago before the resurgence of swine flu hit when most controversy about children and vaccinations revolved around whether or not it contributed to autism, right? You would want him to be aware of the concern about the harmful effects of the mercury in the flu vaccine on young children and to be able to answer your questions, right?
You are the future, we are counting on you to advance knowledge and care, not back away from it. You need to begin now.
OK – what about the databases? What if you want to search the most current literature for a topic, or a syndrome? And you want authoritative vetted information You have an assignment. Where do you go? The best place to do that is with the databases we pay to subscribe to.
let’s begin with Scopus. Others you might look at are Cinahl, Ovid, Primal Pictures, Pubmed.
Must submit by end of semester I have changed it to just one part