hne health libraries linking evidence with practice

As of 08:30 this morning Health Districts in NSW have been directed by Elizabeth Koff, NSW Health Secretary to escalate to Amber Risk Status.

Today the JHH Executive, along with Dr John Ferguson gave an update via Broadcast, the link to this broadcast can be found here.

One key requirement is that all health staff are required to wear standard, level 2 surgical masks if they are within 1.5m of patients. Visitors will also be asked to mask.

During our usual weekly JHH ALL Staff Information Broadcast on Wednesday, Dr Ferguson referred to a handwashing technique video which can be accessed via this link.  

Please keep an eye on the CE news, Webinars and COVID site on the Intranet as to how you can help us keep us all safe.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is changing the way it writes its guidelines for giving injections in hospitals, following new research from the University of Bath. The study found that hospital nurses make far fewer mistakes when administering medicines intravenously if they follow instructions written with nurses in mind. Current NHS guidelines on intravenous injections are written by pharmacists with little input from their primary audience - nurses. These instructions can be confusing or overly complicated, which contributes to 30-50% of intravenous doses being incorrect in some way. Researchers used a process called 'user testing', which identifies where mistakes are being made and introduces changes so the instructions are easier to use.
READ full article...
WATCH - Lead author Matthew Jones discuss the study...

This recent meta-analyses based on 21 studies found that use of masks by healthcare workers (HCWs) and non-healthcare workers (Non-HCWs) can reduce the risk of respiratory virus infection by 80% and 47%. Masks had a protective effect against influenza viruses, SARS, and SARS-CoV-2. The protective effect of wearing masks in Asia appeared to be higher than that of Western countries.
READ full article...

SARS-CoV-2 continues to disseminate globally and there are likely to be recurrent waves of infection into the foreseeable future. We would argue that low cost interventions including physical distancing and enhanced hygiene have increasing relevance. They will protect against the emerging concern for pre-symptomatic transmission and their optimisation will better enable the more restrictive and economically damaging constraints to be relaxed.
READ this article in the MJA by local public health physician Craig Dalton
Or this one by the same author in the Conversation

Legacy PubMed has been retired, and New PubMed has become the default PubMed site. If it’s been a while since you ran a search on PubMed – or feel a little anxious about the changes – don’t worry, here’s an article that will walk you through the new features.

They include: mobile-friendly design; a cite button - that lets you toggle between different formats, or download citations as an Endnote-compatible file; social media sharing buttons; and a button to copy a permalink. All collections and saved searches stored in your ‘My NCBI’ account are available in the new site.

Find out how to build a search strategy, manage results, save records and see comparisons to legacy PubMed on the Library webpage – ‘Tutorials and Guides’ - PubMed .

For more search tips – see the National Library of Medicine support page