Strategies for Staying Informed about Public Health Concerns

1. Strategies for Staying Informed about Public Health Concerns Kristine Alpi, MLS, MPH kalpi@att.net November 6, 2004

2. Objectives and Competencies • Articulate three strategies for staying informed about news and developments relevant to public health. • Analytic assessment. “Identifies relevant and appropriate data and information sources.” • Inform, educate and empower people about health issues. “Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems”

3. Why Adopt Strategies to Stay Informed? • Credibility and advance preparation time • Limited budgets for meetings, etc. • Potential to identify collaborators • Professional responsibility • Changes in speed of information access • Are there other reasons that would convince colleagues or administration to make time for keeping up?

4. Strategies for Keeping Up • Identify specific resources in areas of interest: • Web sites that have news updates or continuous news feeds. • E-mail discussion lists (Listservs™) • E-mail announcement/notification lists • Journal table of contents (TOC) of the latest issue • Automated subject-specific literature searches • Professional organizations • Outline a plan for incorporating keeping up-to-date into a work routine

5. Characteristics of Workable Strategies • Efficient – provide the most useful items in the least amount of time • Maintainable – share monitoring duties with others • Modifiable – change easily as issue develops • Reasonable – require limited information disclosure for registration; opt-outs available • Time-sensitive – can be short-term, project-specific, long-term & ongoing

6. Web Sites with News Updates • Find a relevant general site or specific topic site [search on keyword and news or what’s new or update] • Bookmark it • Make it your default home page • Follow up on the news to actual studies • Track page without a what’s new category • Change detector sends E-mail when changed http://www.changedetection.com/monitor.html

7. Medscape www.medscape.com/publichealthhome

8. NY State Home

9. What’s New page

10. Change Detection

11. E-mail Discussion Lists (Listservs™) • Discussion lists are interactive lists • Disadvantages –postings volume, no quality control • Advantages – ability to post questions and get feedback • Reduce volume with daily Digest format • Review or search list archives • Sign on to observe a list for a week and then re-evaluate.

12. E-mail Discussion Lists • Find relevant lists by searching the Web sites of likely organizations or browsing some of the following resources: Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce - Discussion and E-mail Lists • http://phpartners.org/dlists.html The School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington has several lists through the Mailman system (example on next screen) • http://mailman.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/ Central list directories: • CataList: L-Soft - http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html • Topica (formerly Listz of Lists) - http://lists.topica.com/ • Tile.Net - http://tile.net/lists/

13. PH-Info List Yes to Digest if you want to have fewer messages.

14. E-mail Announcement Lists • One-way communication of information • Frequency varies • Volume of these lists tends to be lower and more predictable than interactive lists • Many Sites offer a What’s New E-mail update • Subject-specific or organization-specific • See Discussion & E-mail Lists page on the Partners site

15. http://phpartners.org/dlists.html Partners Lists

16. Tables of Contents of Journals • Offered from publisher Web sites (E-Alerts) • Single journal or multiple journals from same publisher • Some require registration • Activate the online access for print subscriptions • Can also set up for multiple journals as automatic search (next slide) • Core Journal List provides possible titles • http://publichealth.yale.edu/phlibrary/phjournals/

17. Tables of Contents • Individual title services such as: • Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) • http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwrsubscribe.html • Emerging Infectious Diseases • http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/subscrib.htm • Examples of multiple title alert services include: • Individual publisher sites • BioMail searches of PubMed by journal title • Paid services

18. Oxford Sample Contents http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/tocmail/

19. Automated Subject-Specific Literature Searches • Search by subject, author, institution or journal title • Free searches of PubMed (MEDLINE) by Biomail (www.biomail.org) or PubCrawler (www.pubcrawler.ie) • Pre-prepared searches linked from a web site – Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project(http://phpartners.org/hp/)

20. PubCrawler http://www.pubcrawler.ie

21. Professional Organizations • Benefits of membership for keeping up • Newsletters and journal subscriptions • Discussion lists • Live and virtual meetings • Continuing education opportunities • Assessing an organization • Examine sample newsletters on web • Ask colleagues about networking • Consider local chapters of national organizations

22. Discussion and Planning • Has anyone tried any of these strategies already? How did it go? • How much time could you make available for keeping up? Each day? Each week? • Set-up time takes longer than maintenance. Ask an information professional colleague to assist with set up.

23. Outline a Plan to Stay Informed • How much time do you have? • Will you follow the resources yourself or assign to staff members? • What is your focus? News, legal, best practices, scientific research… • Do you prefer to receive E-mail or go out to resources?

24. Questions or Comments? Contact information: Kristine Alpi kalpi@att.net

25. Case Study Exercises