Keeping up-to-date

Keeping up-to-date with new developments and research in your field can be a particularly time consuming process, and then there's knowing where to even start. A number of blogs are now available which link into various aspects of health information, including regional health news, national health news, specialty news and research articles.

For example, the FADE Library based in Liverpool produce daily health news updates (Another 15 Minutes) for the UK, International and Regional (Cheshire and Merseyside, Cumbria and Lancashire, Greater Manchester) scanning the local, regional and national papers for alerts to articles published that day in the press.

Halton and St Helens PCT with assistance from other Cheshire and Mersey Librarians produce the weekly New Documents Bulletin which scans websites (Department of Health, Kings Fund, BMA, etc) of relevance to NHS staff working in the PCTs highlighting new reports, documents and information that has been recently added to these websites.

Those with an interest in the commissioning process should check out The Commissioner blog again produced locally by NW healthcare librarians.

The Critical Care Bulletin produced by East Cheshire NHS Trust is a good example of keeping up to date within a particular specialty, highlighting new research articles of interest to critical care staff among other things.

Many of the current awareness blogs allow you to subscribe to the updates via email. Links to current awareness blogs are available in the list on the LEFT handside of this blog, just scroll down to 'Current Awareness' for more details. These will continually be added to so keep checking back to see if there are any in your field.