History and Purpose
This service started off as a monthly current awareness service, titled “Dementia: the Latest Evidence“, produced by the Wolverhampton Medical Institute library for staff and students at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals Trust (RWHT).
This service is free to everyone.
The aim of the newsletter is to bring news of the latest evidence (according to best “Evidence-Based Medicine” principles) to the attention of readers.
The abstracts are written with the intention that they will be fairly simple and readily understandable to the intelligent layman, so as not to exclude anyone. Clinicians with detailed knowledge of the field are able to follow-up the original documents using the Full Text Link and/or citations.
Selection Policy
Regarding the selection of materials; the policy is to be eclectic. This is the best approach probably, because dementia research is a multi-disciplinary field and interesting developments appear to arise from many different fields. The guiding principle is, if the newly published work is a serious contribution, from a reputable source and (ideally) evidence-based then it gets due consideration for inclusion in the newsletter.
This policy has since been widened to include other well-recognised and duly regarded information sources which may not be strictly “evidence-based” in the narrow scientific sense. The intention is to provide a generic alerting and current awareness service for anyone with a serious interest in the subject, helping these persons keep abreast with the latest developments.
Readership
As to the audience, this is small but growing slowly (e.g. by personal recommendation). The audience is self-selecting, in that everyone is free to “unsubscribe” themselves from the newsletter e-mail distribution list (and stop visiting this blog and web site) as and when they see fit.
