(This post appeared originally on the Patient Information Forum website)
I am Managing Director of Minervation and many of you will know me through my work on the PiF website.
My interests include evidence-based health care, web design, information science, usability testing, social media and blogging.
I live in Bristol and work from home and from the Minervation office, which is based in central Oxford.
Twenty years ago when we started working in healthcare we were viewed by many as heretics and deviants (some may say that few things change). It has taken many years to place evidence-based healthcare at the centre of clinical practice and health policy making and there’s still a huge amount of work to do, but the approach that we have championed for years is now very much the ‘accepted way’. Health professionals have far greater awareness of evidence than a few years ago, critical appraisal skills are core to many training programmes and the quality of evidence is improving all the time.
The same is not yet true in education. Continue reading
The Learning Disabilities Elf helps you keep up to date with the latest reliable research, policy and guidance: http://www.thelearningdisabilitieself.net/
The team behind the site (John Northfield and André Tomlin) are running a short survey to gather feedback about the future direction of the site. You can find the survey here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ld-elf
Watching Olympic gymnastics should come with a health and safety warning! All I was trying to do was emulate a couple of pommel horse moves and before you know it…
Still, help is at hand! The Musculoskeletal Elf website goes live today. Another evidence-based health information site aimed at health professionals, this time bringing you thrice weekly (Mon, Wed and Fri) updates of the latest research and guidance relevant to musculoskeletal conditions.
Many of you will be horrified to hear that health and social care professionals have no excuse for losing touch with the latest mental health research, policy and guidance.
The new Mental Elf iPhone app now makes it easier than ever to get your daily fix of reliable and relevant evidence in a simple and easy to use format.
We are really pleased to announce the launch of another elf blog, this time tackling one of the most important subjects there is: healthy lifestyle.
Sarah Chapman, Information Scientist from the UK Cochrane Centre is at the helm and the new site is going down a storm with health professionals, publishers, bloggers and the general public at large.
So if you have an interest in diet, obesity, nutrition, exercise, smoking and other public health issues, sign up and get daily alerts to help stay abreast of the latest reliable research, policy and guidance.
André was invited to give a talk at the UK Cochrane Centre 17th Annual Contributors Meeting in Loughborough on 20th March 2012.
It was an interactive session that explored the accessibility and usability of Cochrane systematic reviews and considered how the findings of these reviews could be more clearly communicated to health professionals and the general public. André introduced the workshop participants to blogging and social media and also gave a brief overview of the soon to be launched National Elf Service.
Since the demise of the NHS Specialist Collections, we have noticed that there is a real gap in the market for simple and usable evidence updates that help keep health and social care professionals up-to-date.
This kind of work is our bread and butter and has been for over a decade, so we have decided to launch a series of health evidence services in a number of subject areas, to bring the latest research, policy and guidance to the busy people who need it most.
WELD – Working with Evidence about Learning Disabilities is a new blog service which aims to bring health and social care professionals the latest learning disabilities evidence.
We are producing the website in collaboration with John Northfield, with whom we ran the NHS Learning Disabilities Specialist Collection for many years.