2–8 June is Libraries Change Lives Week .
NHS Wales e-Library joins together to celebrate how libraries support economic growth, and discuss what you can do to help NHS Wales e-Library.
Our Story.
NHS Wales E-Library is a digital library that supports health and care information across Wales.
Our main function is to provide value for money through competitive tendering and continuous review of e-resources, working towards a 'Once for Wales' approach.
As a national service, we procure evidence-based digital resources for users in Wales – changing and avoiding duplicating subscriptions to those same resources. This offers better value for money, careful contract management, and fair access to high-quality, peer-reviewed information. This supports our partners in the Welsh NHS Library and Information Service to acquire specialist resources locally, freeing up their time to better support their users in finding, retrieving and using information.
How we deliver value for money.
Our Collection Development policy guides how we curate our resources in the eLibrary – from review of use, cost per use, and action on user feedback.
We are not doing this alone.
Our users are at the heart of the NHS Wales e-Library service. We ask for their advice and listen to their feedback so that we can show evidence that the resources we acquire meet a wide range of needs and professions.
We run open surveys that users can complete at any time throughout the year to tell us how the national resources have affected their work.
Here's what people have said about the NHS Wales e-Library:
The resources support research and clinical practice where care is provided:
With Guidelines
"Having national access to the NEWT Guidelines has saved time as Medicines Information Pharmacists have been able to advise GPs of their access to 'myNEWT' guidelines rather than having to email relevant PDF files. This means they can provide information to the patient/carer directly during their consultation rather than having to contact us and wait for an email." ( The NEWT Guidelines are a resource for pharmacists and other healthcare professionals who provide or administer medicines to patients with swallowing difficulties.)
With Summaries of Evidence
( Evidence Summaries – or Decision Support Tools – are research and reference e-resources that healthcare professionals can use on the spot when providing patient care.
With Reference Databases
( Scopus is a reference database that can be used to search for literature but also enables users to track references and check, for example, which articles or journals are most cited and which demonstrate impact.)