Support your mental health and wellbeing with these free apps

NHS staff have been given free access to a number of helpful apps until the end of December, to help you support your own mental health and wellbeing through this challenging time.  For more information on how to access these, visit the NHS Employers website.

Unmind

Unmind is a mental health platform that empowers staff to proactively improve their mental wellbeing. Using scientifically-backed assessments, tools and training you can measure and manage your personal mental health needs, including digital programmes designed to help with stress, sleep, coping, connection, fulfillment and nutrition.

Headspace

Headspace is a science-backed app in mindfulness and meditation, providing unique tools and resources to help reduce stress, build resilience, and aid better sleep.

Sleepio

Sleepio is a clinically-evidenced sleep improvement programme that is fully automated and highly personalised, using cognitive behavioural techniques to help improve poor sleep.

Daylight

Daylight is a smartphone-based app that provides help to people experiencing symptoms of worry and anxiety, using evidence-based cognitive behavioural techniques, voice and animation.

Finding improvement case studies

When looking at service development or improvement, the evidence can seem quite limited. In many cases other people may have implemented new ideas or services, but not written it up for publication in a journal.

The sources below provide case studies and examples of improvements or innovations, and may be useful as a way of learning from other people's experiences or getting ideas to implement in practice. It's not an exhaustive list and case studies will be available in other sources, such as individual Trust's websites.

Library staff can also find evidence to support you in developing services or innovations, and we offer an evidence search service.

Academy of Fabulous Stuff

Describes itself as ‘A social movement for sharing Health & Social Care Ideas, services and solutions that work’. Includes informal case studies of new innovations or ideas. The quality of reporting varies.

eWIN Workforce Information Network

eWIN is the NHS workforce information network designed to enable improvements in workforce development, efficiency and productivity.

To search, visit the Tools and Resources page, enter your search terms and select ‘Case Study’ before running the search.

Health Foundation

An independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. To find case studies, run a search and filter to ‘Improvement projects’.

NHS Confederation

Membership body that brings together and speaks on behalf of all organisations that plan, commission and provide NHS services.

To find case studies, run a search and filter to ‘Case studies’ (under ‘Category’) then click ‘Apply Filters’.

NHS England

Search the publications database, and filter to ‘Case studies’. This is a very small collection.

NHS Improvement

Visit the Resources page, run a search and filter to ‘Shared Learning’.

NHS Improvement and NHS England have merged so this website may change, but new resources are still being added as of February 2020.

NICE Local Practice Case Studies

A number of case studies around implementing NICE Guidance in practice.

Staying informed of the latest evidence with KnowledgeShare

KnowledgeShare Evidence Updates is a personalised service to keep you up to date with new knowledge and evidence in healthcare. You save time by only seeing items relevant to you.

As well as covering the whole range of physical and mental health conditions and risk factors, KnowledgeShare covers a huge range of professional interests and several new categories have been added this month:

  • Coronavirus Infections

  • Freedom to Speak Up

  • Bullying and Harassment

New and existing subscribers can sign up for updates on these topics, and any others, by completing the evidence update form to ensure you get the latest information.

An easy way to stay ahead of the latest journal articles

Want to keep up to date with your favourite healthcare journals? Want to know when articles on your favourite topics are published? The free Read by QxMD app allow you to do just this, and to access many full-text articles with a single tap.

Full-text is available for articles that are available from our subscriptions or where the article is open-access, and you can link to the journal holdings of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, Staffordshire University or Keele University.

Read by QxMD is available as a desktop version, or for Android and iOS devices. On the mobile version, you can store your OpenAthens account to make downloading available articles even quicker.

Curate your own personalised healthcare journal, and share it with colleagues via email, Facebook and Twitter. Add papers to your own virtual collections, recommend papers, and discuss articles.

Stay ahead of the latest healthcare research and download the Read by QxMD app now.

Changes to downloading e-books

We offer a collection of over 16,000 e-books on the ProQuest Ebook Central platform and these can either be viewed online, or downloaded to a mobile device for access anywhere.

If you want to download an e-book, you'll now need to install the Adobe Digital Editions app for Android or  iOS. This is a free app, but does require you to register for a free Adobe ID. You'll also need your NHS OpenAthens account to download e-books to your device.

Our guide to downloading e-books gives more details and also explains how to access chapters of e-books on dedicated e-book readers.

Once you've got the app set up, you'll be able to download our e-books to your mobile device for up to 14 days for offline reading. If you need them for longer, simply download them again.

If you already have the Bluefire Reader app installed, this will still work for now.

 

Benefiting from the ‘research effect’: The case for trusts supporting clinicians to become more research active and innovative

In November 2019, the Royal College of Physicians published a document entitled 'Benefiting from the ‘research effect’: The case for trusts supporting clinicians to become more research active and innovative', suggesting a number of ways that NHS Trusts can support staff to become more research active, and how this will benefit both patients and staff.

It showed that involvement by staff in research can improve their morale, and can help the recruitment and retention of staff. One finding is that staff lack protected time to do research, and this reports suggests that this should be a key priority. Two-thirds of RCP members surveyed said they want to do more research.

Patient outcomes in Trusts that are more research-active are better, and CQC inspections include research activity in their remit. In addition, patients feel more valued by being involved in research, learn more about their treatment, and gain a sense of pride in helping others.

Research tends to be concentrated in certain areas such as the South East of England, or large urban areas. Smaller and rural hospitals must also be encouraged to become more research active and benefit from the research effect.

The report makes clear that research is more than clinical trials, and can include anything that provides new evidence, including robust service evaluation.

How do Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries support research?

The report suggests that it is it is ‘increasingly important to ensure that the clinical workforce is equipped to appraise and generate evidence’ (p. 11). We support the appraisal of evidence with the provision of critical appraisal training, which can be provided to groups of staff. We also signpost to resources such as the CASP critical appraisal checklists, or to PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews. Our Knowledge Navigator tool provides advice on how to search for different types of research such as randomised controlled trials, observational studies and qualitative research.

Our librarians can also assist in creating systematic reviews, by designing and carrying out search strategies, providing advice on databases, or advising on where to publish. Recently, a systematic review was published that involved one our librarians, who was listed as a co-author. We can also carry out literature searches for other research.

We also attend the SaTH Research & Innovation committee, to advocate for library services and also gain a better understanding of the local issues. As part of our work with Research & Innovation, we manage a staff publications database, to track and promote local research publications, and these include conference abstracts, poster presentations and innovations such as those published on Fab NHS Stuff. Staff of SaTH can submit details of their own publications to the collection.

For 2020, we're planning to introduce a course for nurses and midwives called 'Research Ready' that will include training on how to find and appraise the research literature, and the opportunity to discuss and reflect on a journal article as a way of gaining hours for revalidation. We're also looking to run some timetabled training on critical appraisal that will include a look at how to interpret the statistics in a research paper. Keep an eye out for further details in the New Year!

Finding full-text in Google Scholar

Whilst we don't advocate relying on Google Scholar for finding articles (much better resources are available, such as HDAS) we know that it can be useful for quick searches, citation searching, or sometimes just to see if it throws up things that might be further down the search results in other databases.

If you do choose to use Google Scholar, it's possible to select a library's journal holdings so that when you search it, you'll see links to any available full-text articles.

To enable this feature, click on the menu button at the top left (the 'hamburger' icon) and select 'Settings'. Click 'Library Links' and then enter a search term (e.g. 'keele'). Library links are available for Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, Keele University and Staffordshire University. Up to five libraries can be selected.

If you're using a SaTH PC, library links for Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are already automatically added, but you can select other ones.

To ensure your preferences are saved for next time, you'll need to be logged in with your Google account. Don't forget, you'll also need an NHS OpenAthens account, or your university login to access the full-text once you've found it!

Read by QxMD helps you keep up to date with new articles

Read by QxMD is an app and website that allows you to discover and read relevant new healthcare journal articles. It does this by enabling you to specify journals, collections, keywords or topics to follow, and suggests relevant new articles that match your criteria. This way, you can build your own personalised alerting service.

It's free to create an account, and you can link your account to the journal holdings of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, Staffordshire University or Keele University to make downloading PDF copies of articles easier.

On the mobile version, you can store your OpenAthens account so that when you view a paper, the app will attempt to download the PDF version if we subscribe to the journal or if it is available, an open access copy. If you find an interesting paper and it’s not available as a PDF, we can still order a copy for you - you just need to complete an article request form available on our website.

You can add papers to your own virtual collections, recommend papers, and discuss articles.

Read by QxMD covers a wide range of healthcare journals, so you’ll see more than just the ones we subscribe to.

We also suggest that you also sign up to KnowledgeShare If you want to keep up to date with new guidance, reports, UpToDate Practice Changing Updates, and other high-level evidence as these materials are not all covered by Read by QxMD.

Let's talk about dementia

 

SaTH Health Library have lots of resources to help you get a better understanding of dementia.  This includes information, advice and support, books, leaflets, contacts, and much more.  Investigate our reminiscence boxes and evoke old memories from objects and smells.  Borrow then for use with staff or patients.

 

 

Of particular interest to:

- Anyone whom works with people diagnosed with dementia

- People who have a friend or family member who has dementia

- People in the early stages of the disease

 

 

 

Royal Marsden Manual: the go-to resource for nursing care

The Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Procedures is an essential guide for nurses, nurse associates and healthcare assistants, and contains over 350 evidence-based clinical procedures related to every aspect of nursing care, from handwashing to cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

As well as supporting clinical practice, it can aid in writing local guidelines, in audits, and it can be used for educating staff.

How to access

The Royal Marsden Manual is available to SaTH staff and students via the SaTH Intranet Apps menu without a password. Simply click the icon to get full access.

Off-site access is also available to staff and students of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and also to Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust via an NHS OpenAthens account. NHS OpenAthens accounts allow access to a range of library and knowledge resources.

There is currently no mobile app, but the website is optimised for use on tablets and mobiles.

The Manual can be searched to find a procedure, or you can browse by chapter, procedure or illustration.

Local guidelines and notes

Local guidelines can be added to the Royal Marsden Manual in the form of links to the specific guideline on the SaTH Intranet, and local guidelines will then appear in search results.

It is also possible to add local notes to a Royal Marsden Manual guideline, and any local content is distinguished by a pink background.

If staff from Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust would like to discuss adding local information, please contact either Jason Curtis, Site Librarian at Shrewsbury on 01743 492511 or jason.curtis1@nhs.net, or Louise Stevens, Site Librarian at Telford on 01952 641222 ext. 4694 or l.stevens@nhs.net.