Service change, guidelines or policy

Evidence searches for service change, guidelines or policy.

The suggested time to allocate to this search is over 4 hours. There is no maximum time for this search tupes as searches informing guidance and policy especially need to be comprehensive.

Planning

You should establish the specific circumstances of the service change/policy/guideline and why it is needed/wanted.

Consult your Trust intranet’s policies section for existing documents, and search within these for references.

Your full search strategy should retrieve the documents referenced. If it does not, consider why not.

If search results are outside of the remit of the search or the date range specified by the requester then that is fine.

Execution

Perform an advanced Google search for policies/guidelines from other Trusts and, if appropriate;

• include “NHS Trust” in your search terms and/or narrow the search to sites with URLs ending “…nhs.uk” using the "limits site:nhs.uk" or "inurl:nhs"
• limit the search to UK sites, with the "doctype:doc" or "doctype:pdf" limits to pick up policy documents and guidelines from around the country using advanced Google search

You should search these sources:

• National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidance
• Trip Database (using the “Guidelines” filter)
• Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network’s (SIGN)’s website
• FutureNHS for any workspaces (replete with useful documents and knowledgeable colleagues) relevant to your search topic and/or your requester

You should also focus on high-level evidence from:

• Cochrane Library
• University of York: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) for systematic reviews and synopses
• National Institute for Health and Research (NIHR)

If these searches retrieve nothing, search appropriate bibliographic databases including Medline and Embase.

Limit your results to the last 5 years (or the year of the existing guideline’s/policy’s publication). 

You should consider searching preprint servers.

Results

Your report may be getting shared amongst a multi-disciplinary team, so try and make it easily digestible. For the same reason, try to ensure your report includes some open access papers, but do not limit your search to open-access research only.

You may want to consider directing your requester to the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare for help demonstrating how their service change idea, or new guideline/policy can benefit “the triple bottom line” of “people, planet, profit”.

Examples