Minervation

Minervation launches National Elf Service for mental health

Join-the-elvesToday we are announcing the launch of our National Elf Service, designed to help busy health and social care professionals easily stay up to date with today’s huge volumes of significant research developments in their fields, improve their knowledge, and reduce error. For entry-level users, the service is free.

The National Elf Service is the brainchild of our Founders André Tomlin and Douglas Badenoch, humorously branded with the idea of Elves who ‘dig and delve’ (1).  This service, where basic membership is free to users, is designed to benefit practitioners and patients alike by providing user-friendly updates on the most significant new evidence selected from today’s avalanche of high quality research.

Health and social care professionals are inundated with new evidence.  They can’t keep up to date, yet they are required to for professional development and audit purposes.

The National Elf Service tackles this problem in a unique way. Created by professionals for professionals, it summarises high quality new evidence that is relevant to practice using industry-standard appraisal criteria and an accessible and user-friendly front-end.

The service also features open and transparent discussion of the evidence, bringing together clinicians, patients and researchers.  And users can track their learning as they engage with the evidence using the service’s curated content and continuing professional development tools.

No other service works in this way.  The mantra is:

  • No bias
  • No misinformation
  • No spin
  • Just what you need!

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Testing Treatments interactive: why we need fair tests of treatments, what they look like and how to get involved

Modern medicine has been hugely successful at reducing the impact of disease and increasing life expectancy.

In spite of this, too much medical decision making is based on insufficient evidence. As a result, doctors and other health professionals have sometimes harmed patients instead of helping them.

Avandia box

Avandia was withdrawn after evidence of adverse events mounted up

As recently as 2010, for example, the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia) was found to have caused serious cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes in spite of being licensed for over 10 years.

How we can prevent these things from happening again is the theme of Testing Treatments interactive (TTi), a family of websites Minervation has produced with an international group of collaborators.

TTi is about how we tell whether one treatment is better than another. In other words, it’s about what constitutes a “fair test” of the effects of treatments.

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Find high quality health apps at myhealthapps.net

shutterstock_98943296Anyone who has spent any time browsing the Apple App Store or the Android Apps on Google Play will be familiar with the problems that face people looking for health or medical apps:

  • There are thousands of apps and most of them are poor quality
  • There are no recommendations from trusted individuals or organisations
  • It’s hard to find what you want amongst all of the sex therapy, yoga and diet fad apps!

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Quality Practice: a new national federation of the UK’s best General Practices

QP_logoThe primary care landscape has changed beyond all recognition over the last few years. Running a successful general practice requires not just excellent clinical practice skills, but increasingly high quality commissioning, business development, workforce and organisational development skills.

Quality Practice is a new national federation of high quality practices whose members are drawn from the UK’s best General Practices.

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New responsive web design for the Vitamin D Council

We have been working with the Vitamin D Council for a few years now.  In that time, we have helped them completely redevelop the way they produce health information and have supported them to become a self-funded membership organisation that generates significant revenue from membership subscriptions via their website.

This week sees the launch of a new responsive version of their website, which looks fantastic on desktops, tablets and mobiles.  The logo, web design and illustrations were created by our friends at Design By Day.

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