Just a little healthcare humor

Mod 3 - I forgot to mention

I really like the National Clearinghouse site. My search there resulted in an evidence based practice guideline for preventing DVT in multiple types of patients as well as research articles comparing lovenox, unfractionated heparing and sequential compression devices. It's a great resource I've bookmarked and will keep using.

Mod 3 - change might be my friend but I'm not sure yet

Searching for articles has always been daunting to me. When I’ve searched for articles during my first 2 semesters I had no guidance about how to search. Well, except for Jean LeBer’s 2 day tutorial when I and all my distance cohorts got together on campus to experience the feeling of drowning in information together.

I searched CINAHL, and www.searchmedica.com, and Johns Hopkins University through EndNote. I’ve used CINAHL often and though it lead to 3225 results before I set limits and 31 with limit I decided to use PubMed. I had only searched it through EndNote prior to this assignment. Do you hate moving outside your comfort zone as much as I do?

I can’t imagine the costs to subscribe to all the different sites if we didn’t have the universities VPN access. That thought makes me worry about access to all this information after I graduate.

PubMed had over 200 articles linked to my search for best practices for preventing DVT in trauma patients. With limits I had 22 articles to read. I did not limit the age of the research and after reviewing the results I only had 11 articles published in the last 5 years. PubMed was easy to use, but saving my search was an adventure. I discovered I had to create an NCBI account in order to save the search. I think I prefer CINAHL and searching through EBSCOhost for ease of saving searches and exporting to EndNote.

Johns Hopkins University through EndNote only had 1 article and searchmedica.com was not organized well. My search through searchmedica resulted in thousands of articles that had no relevance to my query. I will investigate it further to see if I can learn how to more effectively use it because there was a tremendous amount of information and I could sort it according to catagories like “evidence-based articles,” “practice guidelines,” and “patient education”.

MeSH terms are still a scary thing but now that I'm sailing outside my comfort zone I will dive into using them as well.