Steve’s tragic death (click here for more details) has had a dramtic impact on our search records. For the first four and a half days of September the article most visited from TRIP, by a factor of 400%, is the eMedicine article on Stingray Envenomations
Yesterday we added the links to 2880 articles in ganfyd. Ganfyd is a collaborative medical reference by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. As the site says:
Ganfyd.org was set up to act as a free repository for the vast amount of knowledge that doctors carry around in their heads, both of a factual nature (for example, the causes of Infective endocarditis) and of a practical nature (how to take blood from somebody with difficult veins, or how to deal with an abusive patient, or even how to ensure you don’t become dehydrated on your first day as a doctor).
All contributors are volunteers and come from either the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand. As with any wiki ganfyd is ‘work in progress’.
It may not meet the strict definition of being ‘evidence based’. However, the value of ganfyd cannot be stated highly enough. Clinical knowledge has an immense value and much of what is written is owned, and controlled, by people/organisations whose first interest is frequently not patient care.
By including ganfyd records in TRIP we hope that there will be a mutual benefit. We will get good content and ganfyd will get increased exposure and therefore volunteers, making the resource even better. If you read a ganfyd article and think it can be improved – make the effort!
Two pieces of wiki news:
1) Dean Giustini has started the UBC HealthLib-Wiki (A Knowledge-Base for Health Librarians):
The idea is to provide a forum for best practice for health librarians, and other information professionals around the world…….We believe this open-model will more accurately reflect the “wisdom of the field” and bring significant value to the wiki’s knowledge-base.
2) Ganfyd, the clinical wiki, is still going strong and an amazing amount of content is now in there. Due to the distractions of getting the TRIP Database re-designed and free I’ve neglected my input. However, as well as being able to contribute I have, at last, found a way of importing data from ganfyd into TRIP. It’s not a hugely robust way but it should end up covering the vast majority of the content fairly quickly.
We’ve had an awful lot of e-mails thanking us for moving to free-access. One of the first (within 3 hours) was from a UK health librarian:
“This is good news! It’s already helped me to find a piece of guidance I hadn’t found by any other route.”
Protocol for the Quick Clinical study: a randomised controlled trial to assess the impact of an online evidence retrieval system on decision-making in general practice . Although I feel more research is needed in this area I’m not hugely convinced about the meaningfulness of any results from this trial. One can predict that those that used ‘Quick Clinical’ will help change clinician behaviour and support clinical decisions. But, more importantly, it won’t check on patient outcomes.
If we want doctors, nurses etc to incorporate ‘evidence’ into their practice we need them to use it routinely, make it very easy to use and supply ‘nuggets of evidence’. I really don’t think that is controversial.
On an unrelated note and following on from earlier blog-entries about USA about citywide wireless access, Norwich, UK is doing the same (click here for BBC News story). I’m still convinced that wireless access to the internet will be widespread (at least in the ‘developed’ nations) in the not too distant future.
The re-indexed material was added at 9am this morning and so far things are working well with no obvious problems.
Well the site is now live, which is a relief. Alas, not all the content decided to join us! Therefore, we’re currently re-indexing things. As it stands all the titles, URLs, publication information are there. However, we’re missing a small (but significant) proportion of text from the body of some publications.
Still it should all be there in time for our scheduled launch date of tomorrow!
We set a target of making TRIP free-access at the start of the year. By March/April the decision had been made. We then needed to give 6 months notice to our distributor (Update-Software) and here we are. Three-months before the end of the year with free-access and a radical re-design of the site.
In previous blog entries (as part of the ‘Countdown to free-access’ series) I have highlighted new features. The last post, in this series, is to highlight a simple fact – we will be free-access. There will be no subscription charges to search TRIP. Clinicians (and non-clinicians) will be able to go to www.tripdatabase.com and have free use of the TRIP Database.
It’s free!
Trip Database Blog 
Recent Comments