Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

The Biomedical Library will adjust its hours for the Thanksgiving holiday. On Thursday, November 27, the Biomedical Library will be closed and no services will be available. On Friday, November 28, the Biomedical Library will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and reference service will be available from noon to 5 p.m. Other services and divisions (the History and Special Collections division, Interlibrary Loan, etc.) will be closed on Friday November 28. Our regular schedule resumes on Saturday, November 29: the library is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and reference services are available from noon to 6 p.m.

View a chart of these hours, and locate hours of other libraries on UCLA’s campus, at the UCLA Library Hours web page.

The UC eScholarship repository is sponsored by the California Digital Library within the University of California Office of the President.

The eScholarship repository allows materials to be efficiently shared among the UCs and provides persistent access to digital content. Users may search the entire UC repository of over 25,000 papers, or browse by: research unit/center/department; journals and peer-reviewed series; seminar series; postprints; or campus. Research and scholarly papers included in the UCLA repository have been deposited by the Department of Biological Chemistry, Department of Psychology, and the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, among others. The eScholarship homepage features a Paper of the Day as well as the Top Downloads. To facilitate keeping up with new research, users may opt to be notified of new papers via email alert or RSS feed.

Access quality, easy-to-read patient education handouts for over 1,000 conditions and drugs in the CareNotes system, part of the Micromedex Health Care Series. CareNotes provides a one or two-page handout, with images when appropriate, formatted to indicate the most important information. Handouts are available in English and Spanish. Most topics are covered from a variety of perspectives, and provide separate handouts for each area of care: general information, pre-care, inpatient care, discharge care, and drug information. There is even a special section of handouts covering post-emergency room visit care.  To access CareNotes, click on the CareNotes icon on the Thomson Healthcare Products page, or click on the tab labeled “Patient Ed.” at the top of any Micromedex page.

Clinicians can personalize handouts before printing: change text sizes, add the clinician’s name and contact information and the patient’s name, or type special instructions to be printed on the handout. When a handout is printed, a second copy of the handout can also be printed, making it easier to keep records up-to-date.

UCLA affiliates who have questions about using CareNotes, or want a personalized introduction to this resource, can contact the Biomedical Library reference desk staff at biomed-ref@library.ucla.edu. CareNotes is one of several resources that UCLA clinicians can use to retrieve quality patient education information; continue reading the Biomedical Library Blog over the next few weeks to learn about others.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. It was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). PMC began operating in 2002 and currently contains more than 1.5 million journal articles, most of which have a corresponding entry in PubMed. The archive has material dating back to the mid-1800s for some journals. The NIH’s recently revised Public Access Policy requires authors of NIH-funded articles to submit their work to PubMed Central. To be notified via email when PMC adds a new journal to its list or adds a large number of back issues for an existing journal, add your name to the PMC News list. Access PMC by selecting PubMed Central from the bottom of the left toolbar on the PubMed homepage.

MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine’s consumer health Web site, is celebrating its ten year anniversary.

MedlinePlus provides free, reputable information on health topics, drugs and supplements, the latest medical news, a medical dictionary, an encyclopedia, surgery videos, interactive educational material, information specifically for older Americans, and links to other sites to locate clinical trials and get more information on genetic conditions. Materials included on the site cover a variety of reading levels and languages, including Spanish.

For more information, see the NLM’s press release.

A recent study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that over 75% of patients did not understand at least one part of their discharge instructions. Many other articles talk about the same issues related to a variety of settings and conditions.

Although there is not a single magic bullet to instantly solve all comprehension issues, there are a variety of materials available to help you provide the most effective patient care. Some of these are available to you as a part of library resource subscriptions, and some are available for free from government sources. A few places to start are MedlinePlus, the Micromedex CareNotes™ System, MD Consult, and Access Medicine.

When deciding which resource is best for a particular situation, some points to think about are:

• What grade level is it written at? Most experts recommend 4th grade or lower.
• Does it print out well? If you want to hand it out, you want something brief that prints effectively. You may also want a print-out for documentation purposes.
• Does it give your patient the option to get more information? Your patient may have further questions, or need terms defined.
• Does it come in multiple languages? Even if your patient speaks enough English to get through an appointment, he or she may still understand highly complex instructions or descriptions better in another language.
• Who wrote it? 

Stayed tuned — we will be discussing specific patient education resources in further detail in future posts!