National Elf Service
The National Elf Service is a collection of evidence-based websites that help health and social care professionals bridge the gap between research and practice.
The Mental Elf, Social Care Elf, Dental Elf and their woodland cousins help busy people keep up to date with the latest reliable research.
They do this by finding high quality research, critically appraising it and asking subject experts to summarise it in simple and clear blogs.
The Challenge
Producing evidence-based health information for patients and professionals has been our thing for 20 years now, but this new service has given us an opportunity to really expand on our usual way of working. We have used blogging, social media and online learning to bring the latest research to the health and social care professionals who need it most.
It is hard to keep up to date with recent guidelines, systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials and other high quality evidence. Professionals don’t always have the time and skills to find and appraise research; they need help identifying relevant and reliable evidence.
Many professionals feel out of touch with the evidence that is relevant to their field. They may not traditionally use research in their practice or they may simply have gotten out of the habit of reading new papers.
The Mental Elf features blogs written by hundreds of experts in the field, including clinicians, practitioners, researchers and people with lived experience.
The Dental Elf is a collaboration between Minervation, the National Elf Service and Derek Richards from the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry.
The Solution
The National Elf Service is a blogging platform that covers a wide variety of topics. Our primary aim is to close the 15 year gap between research and practice. We use blogs, podcasts, webinars and social media to disseminate the latest research findings in a format that people can use in their busy lives.
We also facilitate democratic conversations about the latest research, which bring together clinicians, researchers, policy-makes and people with lived experience, so that we can consider the implications of new evidence and act upon findings.
We have succeeded in creating a trusted independent brand, which supports academics to have real world impact with their research.
