Some Thoughts...

Hi everyone! Melissa and I have been brainstorming about some of the questions that were circulated to the group, and some of our collective thoughts are listed below. Looking forward to chatting with everyone this afternoon!

Resources we would you use in relation to a guideline topic:
For a question related to the guideline (i.e. PICO style question), we consult medical journals (both online directly through the publisher and through the databases provided by the library), guideline databases, government websites (e.g., National Cancer Institute), non-profit organizations (e.g., Canadian Cancer Society), and data sources such as SEER or Statistics Canada.

Some specific resources we refer to:
Guideline databases: National Guidelines Clearinghouse, CMA Infobase, SAGE (CPAC)
Guideline developers: Cancer Care Ontario, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network, National Comprehensive Cancer Network, National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia), New Zealand Guidelines Group, European Society for Medical Oncologists, Society of Surgical Oncologists, American College of Radiology, Society of Gynecologic Oncology, BC Cancer Agency
Systematic reviews: Cochrane database, MEDLINE
Research articles: MEDLINE, Pubmed, EMBASE, CINAHL
Data/statistics: SEER, Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada

Key benefits of checking these resources:
It's important to consider the source of the information. When trusted sources and/or high level evidence, such as guidelines, meta-analyses, or randomized controlled trials are available, we assess these sources first. Lower-level evidence, such as retrospective cohort studies or case series, can provide information, but should have the caveat that strong evidence is lacking. Data from SEER and Stats Canada are thought to have been collected in a systematic, standard fashion and are therefore reliable. Data from individual studies may or may not have used sound methodology and need to be reviewed.

Why we're interested in the topic of "clinical practice guidelines":
We develop clinical practice guidelines for cancer treatment as our core business. The guidelines serve (1) to articulate standard practice in Alberta, (2) as teaching tools, and (3) to inform family physicians, other specialists, and patients and families of what to expect for a particular type of cancer. The process of developing a guideline often gets the Tumour Team to discuss important or controversial issues and/or new research.

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service (http://www.delicious.com/), for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks (websites) for our interest groups. Use it like your favourites you save on your computer. The great thing about Delicious bookmarks is they are portable, accessible anywhere with an Internet connection. Key benefits to Delicious:

• access your bookmarks anywhere
• tag your favourites to sort them
• share your favourite sites with others
• see what other people are bookmarking

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default; however, you can mark specific bookmarks as private.

A collection of bookmarks on Clinical Practice Guidelines has been started here:
http://www.delicious.com/YongtaoLin

and started a collection of bookmarks on social media and health care here:
http://www.delicious.com/kathryn.ranjit/social_media

Ready to build your own online bookmark collection?
1. Go to http://www.delicious.com/
2. Click on “Join Now” at the top left corner

What is Social Media?

Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film, they are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information.

One of the foundational concepts in social media has become that you cannot completely control your message through social media but rather you can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" in the hopes that you can become part of that conversation.

The main increase in social media has been Facebook (www.facebook.com). It was ranked as the number one social networking site. The main increase in social media has been Facebook. It was ranked as the number one social networking site. Other examples of social networking websites LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/), MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/), Ning (http://www.ning.com/).

Blogs are usually maintained by an individual or a group on a particular subject with regular entries of commentary, or descriptions of events. Most recent entries are commonly displayed first. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other websites. Blogger (www.blogger.com) is one of the most popular platforms for blogs. While a blogger's anonymity is often tenuous, a blogger's code of conduct is often developed to justify acceptable behavior and online security can also be enhanced by not making the Blog publicly available.

Some of the social media tools that can help with collaboration or/and authority building are Wikis such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org/) and Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com/), social bookmarking sites including Delicious (www.delicious.com) and Google Reader (www.google.com/reader). In addition, Content Management Systems (i.e. Drupal at drupal.org) and Document Managing and Editing Tools (i.e. (Google Docs) are very widely used.

Social media also plays an important part in multimedia and entertainment. People use Youtube (www.youtube.com) for video sharing, Skype (www.skype.com) for livecasting, Flickr (www.flickr.com/) for photography and art sharing, and SecondLife (secondlife.com) to create virtual worlds.

References:

Social Media. Available from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. Retrieved July 4, 2011.

Rutledge, P. (2010). Research Survey Launched: Social Media and Influence of Photos on Body Image. Retrieved July 4, 2011 from: http://mprcenter.org/blog/2010/08/04/research-survey-launched-social-media-and-influence-of-photos-on-body-image/

"Statistics". Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Retrieved July 4, 2011.