Author: Jason Curtis

Library survey results

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Earlier this year, we carried out a survey of our users to find out what you thought about the library service. In all, we had 114 responses, and lots of positive comments and examples of the impact our services have had.

We asked respondents that had used our services in the last 12 months to rate the overall service to them. 85% rated us as excellent, with another 15% rating us as good and 2% as satisfactory. No respondents rated the service as inadequate.

There were lots of useful comments about ways we could improve, and we'll shortly provide more information about what we've done in response.

Please do have a look at the results, and thank you to everyone that responded.

View the library survey results

Changes to staffed opening hours at Telford Health Library

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From 7th July 2025, Telford Health Library will be reducing its staffed hours to 8.30am - 4.30pm Monday to Friday.

Out of hours access is still available to eligible members. Please ask library staff for further information or call 01952 641222 (ext. 4440).

If you need to speak to a member of  library staff after 4.30pm, Shrewsbury Health Library will remain staffed until 5pm Monday to Friday and can be contacted on (01743) 492512 or extension 2512.

We apologise for any inconvenience and will regularly be reviewing our opening hours.

Revalidation Reflective Reading Sessions

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The library is running a series of free reflective reading sessions for nurses and midwives to help with NMC revalidation. Download the list of dates for 2025.

Prior to the session you'll be sent an article to read and a small checklist of points to consider when reading, this will earn you 1.5 hours of CPD time. When you attend the session the article will be discussed in a small group, reflecting on points whilst working through the checklist, this will earn you another 1.5 hours of CPD time. The 3 hours of credited CPD time that you earn from these sessions can be used towards the 35 hours of CPD that you need to acquire to revalidate.

The workshops will be led by Louise Stevens, Librarian, over MS Teams. If you wish to attend one of the sessions, choose from one of the dates and email Louise on l.stevens@nhs.net or call ext: 4694.
 

Critically appraising research for antiracism

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When critically appraising research, there are a number of checklists available from CASP for different types or research. However, none of these checklists include questions to help address possible racial bias.

Ramona Naicker, a medical librarian in Australia, has developed a checklist specifically to help identify any issues around underrepresentation and interpretation that may impact on a study's relevancy, validity and reliability.

The tool can be used as a supplement to another checklist (such as one of the CASP checklists) that look at specific research methodologies.

Access Naicker's Critically Appraising for Antiracism Quality Appraisal Tool

Librarian support for systematic reviews

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Are you looking to write a systematic review? Librarians can support this in a variety of ways, and we've put together a guide outlining how we can help and how you can make the most of the service. For example, we can help with:

  • Carrying out scoping searches to check how much literature is available and check for existing systematic reviews on your topic that might duplicate your work
  • Providing advice on suitable databases to search
  • Designing search strategies to retrieve any relevant articles
  • Providing details of search strategies and numbers of results to enable completion of the PRISMA flow chart
  • Provide advice on appropriate search filters if your search is looking for a particular study design or population
  • Providing lists of references in your chosen format (for example, RIS)
  • Providing access to a RefWorks account if you don’t have access to reference management software

Involving librarians in the systematic review process has been shown to produce significantly higher quality reported search strategies. Having librarians assisting in formulating search strategies and performing literature searches across multiple databases helps researchers minimise bias in their reviews.

Resources on Strep A from UpToDate

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The UpToDate point of care tool has a range of regularly updated articles summarising the evidence around Strep A.

These are being made available to anyone that needs access, without having to login to UpToDate.

All staff at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust have access to UpToDate, both on and off-site of via the mobile app.

Quick links to Strep A information

As with all UpToDate clinical content the topics are written by experts in their field and the content is reviewed and updated as new evidence becomes available to support clinicians in reaching a diagnosis and treating patients who present with suspected Strep A quickly and effectively.

BMJ Best Practice Comorbidities Manager

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Access to BMJ Best Practice has been extended to include the Comorbidities Manager. In the UK, one in three adults suffer from multiple chronic conditions and most patients in the acute setting have more than one medical condition.

The BMJ Best Practice Comorbidities Manager supports the management of the whole patient by including guidance on the treatment of a patient’s acute condition alongside their pre-existing comorbidities.

Available on desktop or app, NHS staff and learners in England can use BMJ Best Practice for free via an NHS OpenAthens account.

Making finding full-text easier

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Whether you've got the title of an article you're looking for, want to look at the latest issue of a journal, or want to be able to access full-text articles when searching the web, there are a number of ways library and knowledge services can help.

From searching within the NHS Knowledge and Library Hub, using BrowZine, using LibKey Nomad, or using Google Scholar Library Links, our short guide and video show you how to make finding full-text a bit easier.

And if there is no full-text available, it's easy to request items from the library and let us do the leg-work!

Watch the video

Using Trip Pro to locate evidence

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Trip Pro is a database that can help you locate material such as guidelines, evidence summaries, systematic reviews and much more.

The basic version of Trip can be searched by anyone, but the NHS has made the Pro version available and this offers more systematic reviews, medical images and advanced search features.

Trip Pro can be accessed on any PC within Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and off-site access is available via an NHS OpenAthens account. When you login with NHS OpenAthens, Trip Pro will automatically provide you with links to full-text articles (where available) including those available through our journal subscriptions.

Trip offers a fairly basic interface, but you can filter results in a number of ways using the filters on the left-hand side. These include a filter for UK guidelines, making it easy to find any NICE guidance, along with guidance from Royal Colleges and other professional bodies. Trip claims to have the largest international collection of guidelines, and these can be filtered by region.

The filter for controlled trials offers an interesting feature whereby the RobotReviewer tool has been used to estimate the quality of trials as either 'high' or 'uncertain' based on the abstract, so a certain amount of critical appraisal has been carried out.

There are also filters for ongoing systematic reviews and clinical trials.

Although Trip Pro does not systematically search the journal literature, it does include a number of results classed as primary research, and these can be filtered to 'key primary research' or just 'primary research'. It's not clear how the distinction is made.

Trip offers a guide to which sources it searches.

Trip Pro searches a number of the resources that were covered by the NICE Evidence Search and is a partial replacement for it as NICE Evidence Search is closing at the end of March.

 

 

Accessing full-text is even easier in KnowledgeShare evidence updates

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There has been a change in the way full-text links in KnowledgeShare Evidence Updates are provided that should make it easier for you to access the full-text of articles you are alerted to.

Where a resource (usually a journal article) has a link that says ‘Check for full-text availability’ you'll be taken to the LibKey system. The first time you use it, you'll need to specify which organisation you work for. Once you've done that, you'll be provided with links to the full-text (if we have access) or a link to our request form (if we don’t) which will automatically populate with the resource details to make it really easy to order a copy.

You'll need an NHS OpenAthens account to view full-text articles or to order items from us.

You may also see a link to 'View article in context' and this will allow you browse the contents of the journal issue where the article is.

If you haven't already signed up, our KnowledgeShare Evidence Update service is a personalised current awareness service allowing you to receive new evidence on topics  tailored to your requirements. It covers policy documents, guidance, reports, and a range of summarised evidence, so you won’t be inundated with primary research articles, and emails are sent each fortnight.