Public Health Resources

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Public Health Resources

• Part II

Peggy Richwine Beth Whipple
Valentines Day, 2008
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Objective

• Increase the public health students knowledge of
  resources that provide the best evidence for
  evidence based practice and improve efficiency in
  retrieving this evidence.
• Areas of focus for this session are
• Health policy
• Environmental Health
• Ethical issues in public health
• Keeping current

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Research question

• One issue in the alarming rise of child obesity
  is the presence of vending machines dispensing
  food with low nutritional value in schools. I
  would like to locate state policies regarding
  vending machines in schools and evidence that
  these policies are improving the health of school
  children.

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Why use resources other than Google?

• Google may not access citations in the hidden
  web. This includes databases and other
  proprietary resources.
• Google does not make accommodation for other
  terms that mean the same as your search term
  (infant, newborn, baby, neonate)
• Databases are targeted to specific interests
  (health, education, business, etc)
• More efficient searching
• Can refine search to get very specific
• Linking to full text or information on how to
  locate item if not electronic

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Consider the terms

• Consider broader or more narrow aspects of your
  topic.
• Child obesity
• School lunches
• Nutrition school age children
• Other ways of expressing the same term
• Plurals
• Other spellings (e.g., British spellings)
• Health Policy
• Nutrition policy
• School policy

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Where to start To find policies

• Public Health Partners
• http//phpartners.org/
• AHRQ
• http//www.ahrq.gov/
• Grey Literature NYAM
• http//www.nyam.org/library/pages/current_grey_lit
  erature_report
• IPHIN
• http//www.medlib.iupui.edu/pbhealth/

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Where to start To find best evidence

• PubMed
• http//pubmed.gov (on http//library.medicine.iu.e
  du click on PubMed to access our electronic
  journal articles)
• PubMed preformulated search filters
• http//nlm.nih.gov/hsrph.html
• Clinical queries includes systematic reviews (on
  left sidebar of PubMed homepage)

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http//www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/hedges/search.html
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http//sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro.html
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http//www.cdc.gov/Environmental/
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http//www.cdc.gov/od/science/phec/resources.htm
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http//bioethics.od.nih.gov/pubhealth.html
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RSS feeds

• RSS feeds
• RSS feed readers
• Bloglines
• Adding RSS feeds with Bloglines
• New England Journal of Medicine
• PubMed search

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RSS feeds

• What?
• Really Simple Syndication
• Way to see late-breaking news without having to
  visit the websites
• nytimes.com, indystar.com
• Website might have multiple feeds
• nytimes.com (homepage, education, movie reviews)
• In essence, the feeds themselves are just web
  pages designed to be read by computers rather
  than people. --news.bbc.co.uk

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RSS readers

• Feed reader/aggregator
• Software that checks all
• your feeds and alerts you
• to the latest updates
• Can be
• Web-based (Bloglines, GoogleReader)
• Email-based (Thunderbird, Outlook)
• Browser-based (IE 7 live bookmarks, Firefox)

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Questions?
Slides available at http//medicine.iu.edu/library
classes
Beth Whipple ewhipple_at_iupui.edu Peggy Richwine
mrichwin_at_iupui.edu