NU308: Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice: Articles

National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC)
The NGC mission is to provide physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation and use. The NGC offers:

• Structured abstracts (summaries) about the guideline and its development
• Links to full-text guidelines, where available, and/or ordering information for print copies
• A Guideline Comparison utility that gives users the ability to generate side-by-side comparisons for any combination of two or more guidelines.

TRIP
The TRIP Database started in 1997 as a result of the work of the founders in answering clinical questions. One of the remits of answering the clinical questions was to return them in a clinically relevant time frame. As well as being quick the clinical questions needed to be answered using the best available evidence. Therefore, to identify the best evidence involved moving from website to website in order to identify relevant material. If each site took 5 minutes to search and 12 websites were examined it added an hour to the search time. If all the content were searchable at one website it would significantly improve the search time. Initially, a manual search of each evidence-based site was undertaken with titles, URL and year of publication recorded in a spreadsheet. Shortly afterwards a chance conversation led to the spreadsheet being converted to a crude web-based search engine.