Strategies for Staying Informed about Public

Health Concerns

Kristine Alpi, MLS, MPHkalpi@att.net

November 6, 2004

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”

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?

Strategies for Keeping Up

• Identify specific resources in areas of interest:1. Web sites that have news updates or continuous

news feeds.2. E-mail discussion lists (Listservs™)3. E-mail announcement/notification lists4. Journal table of contents (TOC) of the latest issue5. Automated subject-specific literature searches 6. Professional organizations

• Outline a plan for incorporating keeping up-to-date into a work routine

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

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

Medscapewww.medscape.com/publichealthhome

NY State Home

What’s New page

Change Detection

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.

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/

PH-Info List

Yes to Digest if you want to have fewer messages.

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

Partners Lists

http://phpartners.org/dlists.html

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/

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

Oxford Sample Contentshttp://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/tocmail/

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/)

PubCrawler

http://www.pubcrawler.ie

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

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.

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?

Questions or Comments?

Contact information:

Kristine Alpi

kalpi@att.net

Case Study Exercises