Evidence searches for service change, guidelines or policy

Guidance for this type of search.

The suggested time to allocate to this search: from 4 hours – no maximum time as searches informing guidance and policy especially need to be comprehensive.

Please read For All Evidence Searches before proceeding and see the supplement for examples of this type of search.

Planning

Establish the specific circumstances of the service change/policy/guideline and why it is needed/wanted.

Consult your Trust intranet’s policies section for existing documents, and search within these for references.

Your full search strategy should retrieve the documents referenced; if it does not, consider why not.

If they are outside of the remit of the search or the date range specified by the requester then that is fine.

Execution

Perform an advanced Google search for policies/guidelines from other Trusts, if appropriate:

  • include “NHS Trust” in your search terms and/or narrow the search to sites with URLs ending “…nhs.uk” using the limits site:nhs.uk or inurl:nhs
  • limit the search to UK sites, with the doctype:doc or doctype:pdf limits to pick up policy documents and guidelines from around the country using advanced Google search

Search these sources:

  • NICE Guidance
  • Trip Database (using the “Guidelines” filter)
  • Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network’s (SIGN)’s website
  • FutureNHS for any workspaces (replete with useful documents and knowledgeable colleagues) relevant to your search topic and/or your requester

Focus on high-level evidence from:

  • Cochrane Library
  • University of York: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) for systematic reviews and synopses
  • National Institute for Health and Research (NIHR), etc.

If these searches retrieve nothing, search appropriate bibliographic databases Medline, Embase etc.).

Limit your results to the last 5 years (or the year of the existing guideline’s/policy’s publication). 

Consider searching preprint servers.

Results

Your report may be getting shared amongst a multi-disciplinary team, so try and make it easily digestible.

For the same reason, try to ensure your report includes some open access papers, but do not limit your search to open-access research only

Consider directing your requester to the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare for help demonstrating how their service change idea, or new guideline/policy can benefit “the triple bottom line” of “people, planet, profit”.