Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto

• Mount Sinai Hospital is a fully accredited health care and teaching facility, affiliated with the University of Toronto.

• Located in downtown Toronto, Canada, our hospital has approximately 465 beds, servicing a diverse multicultural community.

Centres of Excellence

• The primary centres of excellence include, maternal, fetal and newborn health, surgical oncology, musculoskeletal disease, gastrointestinal disease and molecular sub-specialty medicine.

Sidney Liswood Library

• Sidney Liswood Library serves 6300 staff and students at Mount Sinai Hospital.

• Our goal is to better meet the information needs of our students, researchers and clinicians, which in turn leads to improvements in education, research and quality of patient care.

Assessment

• The Sidney Liswood Library selected the best clinical decision-making tools for Mount Sinai Hospital’s centres of excellence. Based on these choices, an Intranet-accessible flowchart was designed.

Identified Need

• The EBM Resources Toolkit is a practical complement to our teaching of Evidence-Based Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital.

• The resources provided are hyperlinked on the Sidney Liswood Library Intranet. These electronic resources assist in answering clinical questions.

Implementation

• The evidence-based section of the Sidney Liswood Library Intranet integrates additional Evidence-Based Medicine teaching resources. “An answerable clinical question” opens to a PICO format template.

• The Sidney Liswood Library is in the formative stages of bringing Evidence-Based Medicine to the point of care.

UpToDate

• Subscription-based clinical information resource

• Comprehensive - designed to provide concise, practical answers

• Topic reviews written by physicians

Search terms may be a disease, a particular symptom, or a drug name

It recognizes most medical terms, common abbreviations and word roots

Can change this setting

When to introduce When to introduce disease modifying antirheumatic drugs

Results

• The EBM Resources Toolkit is a pathway that assists in seeking and searching for best evidence. The toolkit offers a practical guide to resources for clinical questions of therapy, etiology/harm, diagnosis and prognosis.

• The EBM resources provide an outline of Sidney Liswood Library’s best external evidence for clinicians and allied health professionals.

Benefits

• Effective and efficient use of the researcher’s time.

• Useful aid for introducing the teaching of Evidence-Based Medicine and Evidence-Based Practice.

• Considerable added value to having access to resources electronically.

Limitations

• The Sidney Liswood Library does not subscribe to all Evidence-Based Medicine resources.

• Current site licenses restricts direct access to additional EBM resources at the University of Toronto Libraries.

Next Steps

• Introduction of this flowchart with hyperlinked resources for PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) use.

• Pursue feedback from our clinicians, allied health professionals and librarians.

Please forward all suggestions or comments about this flowchart to:

Sandra Kendall, B.A., M.L.S., Director, Library Services

Mount Sinai Hospital

600 University Ave. 18th Floor

Toronto, ON M5G 1X5

skendall@mtsinai.on.ca

(T)416.586.4614 (F)416.586.4998

http://www.mtsinai.on.ca

Acknowledgement:

Mrs. Jeannine Banack, Vice President Medical Administration and Special Services for her guidance and continuing support of this initiative.

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