Today 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!
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 Learning Disabilities Elf helps you keep up to date with the latest reliable research, policy and guidance: 
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…
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.
André was invited to give a talk at the UK Cochrane Centre 17th Annual Contributors Meeting in Loughborough on 20th March 2012.