Website: Victorian Refugee Health Network

The Victorian Refugee Health Network provides a rich collection of resources supporting refugee and asylum seeker health in Victoria.

The site includes a free online learning module covering topics like health literacy and mental health. There are links to research publications, reports, and information sheets as well as a library that contains policy documents, weblinks and pages relating to refugee child and adolescent health, nutrition, oral health, sexual and reproductive health and more.

Visit the website Victorian Refugee Health Network.

Website: ADA Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry

The American Dental Association’s Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry website provides a wealth of clinically relevant scientific evidence and research to assist dentists at the point of care.

You will find here:

• A regularly updated database of systematic reviews and summaries on dental and oral health topics.
• ADA clinical recommendations that provide guidance and assist with clinical decision-making.
• A comprehensive page of additional resources to assist with evidence-based practice.
• A series of educational video tutorials on evidence-based dentistry.

Go to the ADA Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry website.

Website: Allied Care Health Hub

Palliative care website CareSearch has recently launched their new resource the Allied Health Hub which aims to meet the information needs of allied health professionals working with palliative care clients.

You’ll find information here about interdisciplinary teams; evidence, quality & research; clinical considerations; professional considerations; clinical & education resources as well as working with patients, carers & families.

Go to CareSearch’s Allied Health Hub.

Website: Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander health literature search tool (PubMed)

The Lowitja Institute has funded the development of a new search filter, Llt.search, that locates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health literature on PubMed.

You can customise and refine your search with Llt.search using one of the 27 search topics provided across health services and systems, health status, health conditions and risk factors.

From the Llt.search website:

• It is an ‘evidence based’ search
• It was developed with experts in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health including health providers, researchers and academics
• It can assist both experienced and inexperienced searchers
• It maximises relevant results and minimises irrelevant items
• It saves time by providing a pre-written search
• It increases the likelihood of retrieving quality retrievals
• It is always up-to-date as it provides real time searches in PubMed.

Use the Llt.search search tool.

Website: The Deeble Institute

An initiative of independent body the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, the Deeble Institute was set up when the AHHA joined forces with seven universities at the end of 2011. The primary aim is to build and support partnerships between health policymakers, practitioners and researchers in Australia.

A key feature of their work is the publication of Health Policy Evidence Briefs and Health Policy Issue Briefs. These are simple, succinct publications for policymakers that synthesise and interpret the evidence in an area of health policy.

Examples include “Is Hospital in the Home as safe and effective as inpatient care?” , “Accreditation of health services: is it money and time well spent?” and “Are midwifery-led models of care safe for mothers and babies?”

Find out more about the Deeble Institute.
Read Health Policy Evidence Briefs.
Read Health Policy Issue Briefs.

Website: Australian Indigenous ClinicalInfoNet

Funded by the Australian Department of Health & Ageing and launched this week, Australian Indigenous ClinicalInfoNet is a new online resource designed to:

…promote best practice in the prevention, identification and management of chronic disease in Indigenous Australians.

It covers the key chronic diseases contributing to the burden of disease in Indigenous people:

•   cardiovascular disease
•   diabetes
•   chronic respiratory disease
•   kidney disease
•   cancer

The web resource provides access to:

•   patient education materials
•   clinical guidelines and reference materials
•   clinical tools
•   systems and services information.

These resources cover the areas of:

•  prevention
•  diagnosis
•  treatment
•  drug therapy

Go to the Australian Indigenous ClinicalInfoNet website.

Website: Looking for case reports?

BioMed Central has developed a new resource containing case reports from over 100 journals.

From the Cases Database  website :

Documenting a patient’s case history to inform physicians how the patient has been evaluated and the subsequent progression of his or her disease is arguably the oldest method of communicating medical evidence. In the 21st century case reports play an equally important role.

BioMed Central have developed a valuable new resource the Cases Database, a continuously-updated, freely-accessible database of over 11,000 medical case reports from multiple publishers, including Springer, BMJ and PubMed Central.

By aggregating case reports together and facilitating comparison, Cases Database provides clinicians, researchers, regulators and patients a simple resource to explore content, and identify emerging trends.

Website: 5 Mayo meal makeovers

Turn potential fat and calorie disasters into healthier recipes with these tips from the Mayo Clinic. Lots more ideas in the Nutrition and Healthy Eating pages.

Recipe makeovers: 5 ways to create healthy recipes

Nutrition and healthy eating home page

Website: Life In The Fast Lane

If you’re working in emergency medicine, or interested in medical education and elearning, or even if you’re neither and just interested in keeping up with your professional reading, this Australian website and blog Life In The Fast Lane should be essential viewing, bookmarked, added to your feed reader, shared!

Started up by Perth-based ER physician Mike Cadogan, co-author of such textbooks as On Call: Principles & Protocols and Emergency Medicine: Diagnosis & Management, the site is content rich and well organised.

It’s a great place to immerse yourself in social medicine and provides a gateway to information created by a vast network of health professionals across disciplines, with interesting voices. Mike Cadogan and his LITFL team are advocates for Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) and passionate about sharing information for free to promote lifelong learning.

Here’s a few highlights from the site:

• A searchable database of emergency medicine and critical care podcasts.
• A searchable database of Australian and New Zealand health, medical, nursing and midwifery blogs.
• A clinical cases collection, over 200 clinical cases in a Q&A format.
• A blogroll of the best medical, nursing, medical news, elearning, health IT, healthy thinking blogs.

Website: The Conversation

Interested in reading some independent analysis and commentary about current healthcare issues affecting Australians? Try the health and medicine pages of The Conversation.

Set up early last year, The Conversation delivers an online news website that taps into the knowledge and expertise of academics and researchers across Australia’s university and research sector.

According to their Charter, they aim to “Give experts a greater voice in shaping scientific, cultural and intellectual agendas by providing a trusted platform that values and promotes new thinking and evidence-based research… [and]… Provide a fact-based and editorially-independent forum, free of commercial or political bias.”