A full day of CECs: finding evidence-based information

Today was an interesting day with two CEC courses. In the morning Chiara Bassi and Carol Lefebvre taught a class on where to find clinical trials, health technology assessment reports and practice guidelines. We went through different websites, trials registers and databases and looked at how to do a search on them. It would be nice if someone could come up with a meta search engine for trials registers and another one that would search practice guideline sites.

In the afternoon we had a hands-on class on searching the Cochrane Library and PubMed. During exercises we first formulated a PICO question, selected MeSH terms and keywords to reflect the different aspects of the PICO and ran the search. We also practiced using PubMed's Clinical queries tool. I myself am an Ovid user so it was good to refresh my PubMed skills. Thanks to Hilde Strømme for an excellent course and for chocolate. I'll make sure to try the same motivational trick next time I teach a class! :)