For NHS Staff and Learners

For NHS Staff and Learners

Uplifting resources for the NHS from the NHS

Health Education England and the Reading Agency have crowd-sourced a list of uplifting, digital resources from NHS staff. The choices were recommended by your colleagues in the NHS, and are ideal for boosting your mood. You can use at your leisure via any computer or mobile device.

Find an NHS Library

NHS Knowledge and Library Services staff provide advice on accessing and searching resources as well as making sense of the evidence. Search the directory to find your nearest health library.

Photograph of two people at a computer desk in a library
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Evidence based digital resources

All staff and learners in the NHS have access to a wide range of digital resources free at the point of use. These include:

  • Databases like Medline, EMBASE and CINAHL
  • Over 7000 journals
  • BMJ Best Practice
  • NICE Evidence
  • Cochrane Library
  • Clinical Knowledge Summaries
  • NICE Pathways.

Find out more about evidence based digital knowledge resources

Contact your local library to find out what additional resources they offer.

NHS OpenAthens

To access most online evidence and knowledge resources, you will need an NHS OpenAthens account. It’s free for staff and learners in the NHS and will enable you to access the evidence anywhere, anytime, from any device.

Register for your free NHS OpenAthens account

Check your eligibility for an NHS OpenAthens account

Guidelines and Policies

Use NICE Evidence to search for guidelines, policies, quality standards and safety alerts from government, the NHS and professional bodies. It also includes information for patients.

Help with literature searching

If you’re new to literature searching, or need a refresher, why not take a look at our e-learning programme, How to Search the Literature Effectively? This will help you build confidence to search published literature for articles and evidence.

Specialists at your local health library can also do expert searches, provide search skills training, and help you keep up to date via current awareness services.

Health Literacy

Did you know that 61% of working age adults can’t fully understand health information if it includes both text and numbers? To find out more about how this impacts healthcare and to learn some simple techniques to help improve health literacy, take a look at our e-learning, Health Literacy: You can make a difference.

Knowledge Mobilisation

Some knowledge is not published but is individual or organisational ‘know how’. The NHS Knowledge Mobilisation Framework is designed to help individuals to develop and use skills to mobilise knowledge effectively. The techniques will help you to learn before, during and after everything that you do, so that pitfalls can be avoided and best practice replicated. A set of postcards is available to complement the framework.