Thursday, August 25, 2005

NCBI (PubMed) toolbar

The NCBI (includes PubMed) has a toolbar (in beta testing) for use with either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

If you use Google's toolbar, the NCBI toolbar is similar. Instead of choosing to search the web, news, images, etc., (as in Google), the NCBI toobar allows you to select from several databases (PubMed, gene, nucleotide, all). As in Google, you can also highlight your search terms.

Read more and download here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/toolbar/

Cheers, Pat

What's New on TraQ

Automatic e-mail updates on PubMed

PubMed now offers automatic e-mail updates in conjunction with saved searches, which are now called "My NCBI" (formerly"cubby"). NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine.

The e-mail updates automatically notify you when new papers are published with your search criteria and can be scheduled for various periods (daily, weekly, monthly). It's a nice feature for monitoring the latest literature. You can also log-in and run your saved searches at any time.

Get your free account here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez

Cheers, Pat

What's New on TraQ

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Implementing new blood safety regulations in the UK

In the UK the NHS Operational Impact Group (OIG) has released its final report on implications of the new regulations on transfusion services, including financial implications. It's fascinating and it's now on TraQ.

For example, they have decided that some activities currently done by hospital transfusion labs might be classified as "processing" under the new regulations and therefore can only be carried out by licensed "Blood Establishments" (blood suppliers - their National Blood Service) after 8 Nov. 2005. Processing includes pooling cryoprecipitate, irradiating components, splitting components, and washing red cells.

The result is that either hospital transfusion services will need to get licensed (like the blood supplier) or else the NBS has to do all the processing for them. There are also other implication for traceability, quality systems, training, and hemovigilance.

TraQ has been following events in the UK related to implementing the EU blood directive because Canada is in a somewhat similar situation. The main difference is that the Canadian standard that affects transfusion services (CSA Standard Z902-04) is not yet regulation. The Canadian Society for Transfusion Medicine (CSTM) has also revised its standards for hospital transfusion services to provide a user friendly equivalent of the CSA standards.

Resources:




Cheers, Pat

What's New on TraQ