Looking for Images or photos to download for presentations?

NHS Photo Library
The images in the NHS Photo Library mainly feature staff and patients in different situations (for example, staff in a meeting, a doctor discussing patient care). All of the people involved have given their consent for the images to be used by NHS or social care organisations. In addition, their are no copyright issues if the images are used within the NHS or social care.

You will need to register for access to the NHS Photo Library. All you need is an email address that ends in either nhs.uk (this would be your work email) or nhs.net. If you don't have an NHS email you need to arrange for a 'sponsor' who does have an NHS email address to confirm that you are employed by the NHS.

National Library for Health Image Search
The National Library for Health Image search is a great way to search across a range of purely medical image collections - including some not available for free on the web. You will need your NHS Athens username to see the full size versions of these.

You get an instant preview and far reduce your risk in terms of copyright. The images include Gray's Anatomy, dermatological images, ECG traces and more - all searched from a single box!

Word of caution using Google images
While you can find images using Google you may well find an awful lot of junk before you find a high quality image. You also need to be aware that using images sourced from the web can leave you in a dubious position in terms of copyright.

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.