TRIPping through the evidence

TRIP (Turning Research Into Practice) is a free database that allows 'health professionals to easily find the highest-quality material available on the web - to help support evidence based practice'.

In addition to searching UK (NLH Guidelines) and international guidelines resources, clinical question and answering services (Primary Care Query Answering Service), patient information and image resources, TRIP currently searches 52 evidence-based synopses and critical appraisal resources including BestBETs, Bandolier and the Evidence Based Journals from the BMJ.

TRIP has a simple search facility (see below) and categorises the results making identification of different types of information (guidelines, patient information leaflets, evidence based synopses, etc) easy!

As an added bonus TRIP Evidence Reviews offer 'evidence blasts' allowing clinicians a quick and easy way of seeing the best new research published in the last 2-3 years.

A few words of caution...TRIP is very useful at quickly identifying useful resources but should not be substituted for a search of the healthcare databases (Medline, Cochrane, etc) if you undertaking a literature review. Bear in mind also that TRIP searches both UK and international resources, this is particularly important to consider when looking for guidelines or patient information.