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Earlier this year one of my patients presented at the hospital
in acute pulmonary oedema and I did a case report on her.
And in order to write up the report I needed to find the current guidelines for the treatment of pulmonary oedema.
And I went to my first search engine
which is usually one of the science search engines and used it, and I couldn’t find anything useful. And then I came across the
NHS Evidence website. I typed in ‘Treatment of pulmonary oedema
and heart failure’ and the first three results that came up were all actually very recent, really relevant
relevant results and a set of guidelines that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. And it basically helped me write the paper
very quickly and I was able to achieve a really good result and I’m really happy about that.
The information was very easy to find. The filters on the page allowed me to hone in exactly on the areas that I was interested in
which in that case was the treatment rather than the diagnosis, or the etiology.
and
and I think
pulling up the papers themselves, could tell right away whether they were relevant to what I was doing.
So it probably only took me two or three minutes
to pull about five or six really good articles off.
What’s good about using
NHS Evidence is that it pulls together quite a lot of different information sources in one place.
So if I want to go find a Cochrane
review about a drug or a NICE guidance for treating any condition
or the technology or the drugs,
before I would have to go to four different places and it would be hit or miss as to what I would find. But in the website
everything is in that one place and I can filter it quite easily which is really useful.
I didn’t actually know that it was ranked in findings right away; I just noticed that I had a lot of useful results.
So I think that that’s quite nice when you don’t realise that it’s sort of doing a lot of the filtering for you.
The thing that would make me keep using it in the future is just its ease of use.
The fact that I can pull up five or six searches,
bring them up right away without having to log on and print them off means I can
do a lot of research over my lunch break which is great.