Allied Health Professions
Databases
PubMed is a Web-based retrieval system developed by the National Center
for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine.
It is a database of bibliographic information drawn primarily from the
life sciences literature and contains links to full-text articles at participating publishers' Web sites
as well as links to other third party sites such as libraries and sequencing centers.
There is a Web-based learning program that will show you how to search
PubMed
This tutorial was last updated in April 2002 and reflects how PubMed
worked at that time. Some pages were updated in October 2002 to reflect more recent changes to PubMed.
Evidence – based practice
Bandolier is an Internet journal about health care,
using evidence-based medicine techniques to provide advice about particular treatments or diseases for
healthcare professionals and consumers. The content is 'tertiary' publishing, distilling the information
from (secondary) reviews of (primary) trials and making it comprehensible.
The impetus behind Bandolier was
to find information about evidence of effectiveness (or lack of it), and to put it forward as simple
"bullet-points" of those things that worked and those things that didn't. A stimulus was a
public health doctor saying that only seven things were known to be effective - an inherently improbable
statement. The problem is that a simple bullet point is insufficient to get across much in the way of
information, so we decided on an eight-page A4 format. Information was to come from systematic reviews
of the literature, from Effectiveness Bulletins from York (which initially were not made generally available),
from randomised controlled trials and from high quality case-control, cohort or observational studies.
Each month PubMed and the Cochrane
Library are searched for systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in the recent
past. Those that look remotely interesting are read, and where they are both interesting and make sense,
they appear in Bandolier.
