A Health Evidence Support Service for health professionals
A Health Evidence Support Service (HESS) has been available to all Health Service staff in the Bradford NHS Health Partnership for three years. HESS was implemented as an extension of the existing Library and Information Services to work proactively with clinical and healthcare teams in primary and secondary care to make more effective use of health evidence obtained from research.
The key roles of the Health Evidence Support Specialist are to package evidence into easily accessible formats and to match individuals with relevant information they are unaware of but likely to require. A number of services are provided in order to achieve this and ultimately to get evidence into practice, these are listed below:
- Weekly New Guidance Bulletins
- An information request service
- Tool Kits for Evidence-Based Practice (intranet and hard copy)
- Hands on Evidence-Based Practice Teaching sessions
- Summaries of evidence for education events
The Health Evidence Support Specialist works closely with research partners within the health partnership. An evaluation project using questionnaires and focus groups is currently ongoing. Initial feedback suggests health professionals have welcomed the service and find it extremely useful. The Health Evidence Support Service was a new post both to Northern and Yorkshire and we believe country wide. Feedback suggests the post has ensured that relevant evidence-based information reaches frontline staff. As a result of the success of this post, another Health Evidence Support Specialist has been appointed at another health community in West Yorkshire.
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