SPHEN-O-GRAM 3

IFMH Study Day “Quality Research Based Information and the New Public Health Agenda”
 Lynn Easton

SPHEN involvement

Get involved in a library committee and travel the world they promised, well with the Scottish Public Health Evidence Network (SPHEN) I have made it to York (that is the one in Yorkshire and not the slightly more glamorous but less quaint New York City).  I was there representing SPHEN at IFMH’s (Information for the Management of Healthcare) study day “Quality research based information and the new public health agenda” on 22 November 2004.  My role was to do a short presentation on the work of SPHEN.  Later in the day I got to set out a stall with information on the work of SPHEN and SHINE.   Plenty of informative posters were displayed and on the table back issues of Interim were displayed for browsing.  Also available for attendees to take away were SHINE bookmarks and elibrary pens.

The benefit of presenting meant that I got to hear an entertaining mix of speakers, the worst things was that the study day kept over-running.  As I was due to speak near the end this meant that many had already left for long journeys home by the time I had the opportunity to present.   And even fewer had time afterwards to thoroughly digest SPHEN’s stall.  Mysteriously all the elibrary pens, bar one, had migrated to new homes between setting up at lunchtime and packing up at 4pm.  It warms my heart to think of the black market in elibrary pens that is happening across the world, due to attendees from Scotland, England, Wales and Tanzania.

Professor David Kelly

Highlights of the study day included the keynote speech from Professor David Kelly of the University of Durham.  He detailed (English) public health policy developments (including the recently released English white paper on public health) and it was fascinating to see such divergence between English and Scottish public health matters.  The underlying concepts may be the same eg tobacco control, obesity, SARS and sexually transmitted infections but the published public health policy timetable diverges when working towards different election deadlines.

He stated that the 3 Ps of public health are “protection, promotion and performance” and mentioned plans for the future included strengthening and investing in the public health research capacity – surely good news for public health librarians!

Professor Mike Kelly

Next came Professor Mike Kelly, currently at the Health Development Agency who gave a charismatic talk on evidence starting with Archie Cochrane and explaining how the presentation of evidence has been improving over the years.  For example in the past papers wouldn’t include the “how it was done” or process data.  He also made a plea that researchers need to take responsibility for their evidence and to go beyond publication and use their research to actually change practice.

Public Health Electronic Library

The redeveloped public health electronic library (www.phel.gov.uk) is a database of 1500 records including web resources and events.  For bibliographic information we were alerted to Health Promis (http://healthpromis.hda-online.org.uk/) containing over 60 000 references.  The future involves the creation of a national public health language.  This might mean the next SPHEN-O-GRAM  requires a dictionary, or it might mean that increased interoperability between various public health projects becomes reality.

Public Health in the Media

The King’s Fund has investigated patterns of health reporting in the media involving analysis of news content, unsurprising there was bias.  A graph was shown that detailed how many deaths each subject required to get a news story- it seemed you needed 4444 deaths caused by smoking to merit a news story compared to just 1.5 deaths for vCJD.

ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Public Health

Mark Petticrew talked about the work of this centre based in Glasgow, Liverpool and Lancaster (http://www.evidencenetwork.org/).  He noted that public health evidence is frequently unpublished, widely dispersed, hard to find and not in published databases making searches expensive and time consuming.  He stated that systematic reviews should not be the end product and needs to be turned into something meaningful eg a systematic review that starts life in the BMJ appeals mainly to academics, but then ought to be rewritten into a report for wider consumption, into national or international briefing papers and also into localised reports with information that appeals to the practitioners on the ground.

IFMH

More information about Information for the Management of Healthcare can be found on their website http://www.ifmh.org.uk/.

Lynn Easton
Chair of Scottish Public Health Evidence Network (SPHEN)

c/o NHS Argyll and Clyde
Ross House
Hawkhead Road
Paisley
PA2 7BN

Telephone: 0141 842 7223
Email: lynn.easton@achb.scot.nhs.uk