Resources For Clinical Studies
It would be fairly simple for health care professionals to keep up-to-date if easy access to current best evidence for patient care existed in one source. Journals that publish only reports of advanced tip-of-the-wedge research involving patients who are similar to their own do not exist! Even core clinical journals defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (those 125 journals that they feel cover the major advances in clinical care) and those on recommended health care journals lists include articles from all levels of research, and include editorials, letters, professional news, and articles of a broad general nature—none of which reliably support good patient care.
A clinician needs information from five different information sources to provide high-quality and up-to-date care. We will discuss each of these five sources and the types of information they provide, give examples of specific evidence-based resources for each source and describe how they can be accessed or obtained, and provide some initial startup tips and techniques to get the maximum out of each resource. The five sources are: textbooks (repositories of factual information that seldom need changing); journal subscriptions: general, specialized, and summary journals; a “personal collection” of material to support routine clinical and other usual activities (for example, a personal reprint collection or a specialized database of articles related to your clinical practice); a MEDLINE or other large database service for nonroutine topics that are often not covered by the sources from the first three categories; and an Internet connection.5475
Content on this page was last changed on March 19, 2009.
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| 5475. | McKibbon, A. PDQ Evidence-Based Principles and Practice, 1999, BC Decker Inc., Hamilton, Ontario. |