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Wondering where to go for answers to quick clinical nursing questions since Nursing Reference Center Plus is being discontinued? We suggest using Dynamic Health, a database made by nurses, for nurses and allied health professionals. Designed to support evidence-based practice and clinical decision-making, it includes many of the great features of Nursing Reference Center Plus with some new additions. You can see our previous blog post introducing Dynamic Health here (https://libguides.mssm.edu/blog/Dynamic-Health), but in this post, we’ll look more closely at a few of its features.

How to Access Dynamic Health

First, how do you get there? There are a few ways!  

Access Dynamic Health on the Levy Library website under Databases: https://libguides.mssm.edu/dynamichealth; by clicking on the Dynamic Health: Nursing Resources icon on the Mount Sinai launcher, which replaces the Nursing Reference Center Plus icon;

or by going to the Nursing Resources Guide (https://libguides.mssm.edu/nursing):

All of the features discussed below can be found either on the top ribbon or under the Explore Resources section in the middle of the main Dynamic Health page. You can browse the categories or utilize the search bar at the top if you have a specific topic in mind.

Patient Handouts 

Patient handouts have four categories: Diseases & Conditions, Procedures & Tests, Health & Wellness, and Discharge Instructions. If you’d like to browse them, handouts are arranged alphabetically (with a find feature at the top to easily filter down) and are available to print out in English and Spanish. Many have accompanying images. There are two options for saving as a PDF or printing; when choosing the print icon, you can choose which of these sections you’d like to include in the handout if you do not want to include them all.  

Examples of patient handout topics include:

• Acute Pancreatitis
• Intubation and Mechanical Ventilation
• Diabetes and Footcare 
• How to Care for a Surgical Wound

Skills

Skills guides have several categories as well: Nursing Skills, Health Profession Skills, Clinical Assistant Skills, Cultural Care Skills, and Patient Instruction Skills. These range from basic to specialty-specific skills, and also include information for allied health professions. A useful feature of these summaries is that they have accompanying checklists, which can be printed out and used for evaluation. When printing, you can choose to select all steps: Preprocedure, Procedure, and Postprocedure Steps, or just one or two.

Examples of skills guides include:

• Assessing False Labor Braxton Hicks Contractions 
• Preventing Pressure Injuries in Adults
• Culturally Sensitive Care for Patients of Cuban Heritage With Mental Health Concerns
• Educating About Asthma in Pediatric Patients
• Performing Point-of-Care HbA1c Testing in Ambulatory Care: Clinical Assistant

Cultural Overviews

Cultural Overviews provide information on providing care to diverse faith and heritage groups. Guides go into special health considerations, communication dietary practices, decision-making with regard to relationships, and traditional health beliefs and medicines. Related Skills content is also linked on the right side of the page.

Examples of cultural overviews:

• Amish Faith Overview
• Buddhist Faith Overview 
• American Indian and Alaska Native Heritages Overview 
• Black American Heritage Overview 
• Indian Heritage Overview

Earning CE Credit  

Dynamic Health does offer continuing education credits, but in a different way than Nursing Reference Center Plus did (to access your previous credits from Nursing Reference Center Plus, please go to this link: https://ceu.cinahl.com/login). To obtain contact hours in Dynamic Health, register for a personal account (pictured). When you answer a knowledge-based question on the topic and another on the topic’s applicability to your practice, you earn 0.1 contact hours. The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) is the approving credentialing organization for the professional development offered in Dynamic Health.

There are several other categories available through Dynamic Health, ranging from leadership topics to drug monographs from Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses. You can view an introductory video to Dynamic Health here:  https://www.ebsco.com/resources/dynamic-health-practice and a user guide here: https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/Dynamic-Health-User-Guide?language=en_US.  

If you’d like to share links from Dynamic Health with other Mount Sinai colleagues, please add this prefix in front of the link you’re sharing so they authenticate on the way into the resource: https://go.openathens.net/redirector/mssm.edu?url=

Questions?  Contact us: RefDesk@mssm.edu 

The Levy Library is happy to announce that Mount Sinai's subscription to resources from BMJ offers new benefits for our community. 

For publishing:

Mount Sinai corresponding authors can publish for no-cost in BMJ Open Quality for their articles accepted between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2028.

BMJ Open Quality accepts original research, local, national, and international quality improvement projects, value-based healthcare initiatives, and educational improvement work.

To submit an article to BMJ Open Quality:

• Visit BMJ Open Quality's author page to review submission guidelines.
• Submit your article via the BMJ Open Quality Submission Portal.
• Enter the Icahn School of Medicine's institution discount code to confirm your affiliation and waive publishing fees.

We are continuing our agreement for no-cost traditional publishing in BMJ Case Reports.  

For journal and database access:

We now have full text access to all BMJ Journals and our BMJ Best Practice tool now includes the Comorbidities Manager (learn more on the BMJ website) 

The Levy Library has added a new evidence-based, nursing database to the collection: Dynamic Health. Dynamic Health is a point-of-care (POC) tool designed to support evidence-based practice (EBP) and clinical decision-making.  Dynamic Health can help nurses and allied health professionals quickly obtain answers clinical questions, review nursing skills, and explore leadership and management topics. Created by nurses for nurses and EBSCO, a leading provider of research databases, Dynamic Health’s robust content enables users to search for information on:

• Diseases & Conditions
• Signs & Symptoms
• Interventions & Treatment
• Skills/procedural Instructions
• Drugs (from Davis’s Drug Guide)
• Labs & Diagnostic Tests
• Patient Handouts (many in multiple languages)
• Leadership and Management Topics
• Earn CE Credits

Dynamic Health offers two ways to search: by term or by category. To search a term, simply type the term into the search box (such as a disease, symptom, procedure, drug, etc.)  Dynamic Health will offer auto-complete options. (The ‘Go To’ option displays topics on the term. And below it, the ‘Search For’ option offers broader results.) (Figure 1).   On the search results page, users will have the option to further narrow the topic with filters for interventions, prevention, skills, tests, images, videos, patient handouts, leadership, and others.    

Figure 1.  Type a term into the search box to search a term.                         

Another way to search is by topic category.  Dynamic Health provides the option for users to search within a category such as: Diseases/Conditions; Signs/Symptoms; Tests/Labs; Interventions; Skills; Drugs; Patient Handouts; Leadership. To search within a category, click on one of the categories listed at the top of the Dynamic Health landing page. (Figure 2.)

Figure 2.  Search a topic using category option.

 It’s easy to find the information you need to support clinical practice, skills, and management topics. A tutorial video can be found here.  Additional searching information is in the User’s Guide. 

To begin earning Continuing Education Units (CEUs), create a Dynamic Health account at the top, right of the landing page. Dynamic Health makes it easy to earn CE credits every time you use the database! 

And of course, there’s a Mobile App.  App instructions can be found on the Levy Library’s Databases A-Z list, under Dynamic Health. 

Access Dynamic Health on the Levy Library under Databases https://libguides.mssm.edu/dynamichealth  

Questions?  Contact us RefDesk@mssm.edu

Chats for Change is an important part of Mount Sinai's dedication to addressing diversity, racism and bias. It is a series of dialogues "built on the notion that in order to respond to racism and be anti-racist we must engage in dialogue, learning, and action." For several upcoming Fall/Winter 2023-24 sessions, Chats for Change is discussing the book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee. Several of our library staff have attended previous Chats for Change sessions, and we are committed to supporting learning in these series. When we saw that this book was going to be featured, we acquired an e-copy for the wider Mount Sinai community to read and learn from.

To access this e-book, click on this link, scroll down to "View Online", and click the "Ebook Central Perpetual, DDA, and Subscription Titles" link. You may be prompted to enter your Mount Sinai network ID and password to access it. Please note that due to licensing restrictions, only one user can read or download the e-book at a time.

This book, in print, e-book, and audiobook formats, is also available to request at NYC library branches. Clicking on these links will send you to that respective library's catalog: 

• New York Public Library
• Queens Public Library
• Brooklyn Public Library

Want more? The Levy Library also has a Special Topics Collection on Race & Society.

Do you know of a book that would be a good addition to this collection? Suggest a purchase here.

We've recently launched a guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Learning and Discovery, and within it, a new blog dedicated to AI in teaching and learning. Head on over to https://libguides.mssm.edu/ai/blog to take a look at our recent posts on new literature and happenings in the world of AI, and subscribe to the AI blog to be alerted when we post new entries there!

Have questions about the AI guide or the blog? Feel free to reach out to us at refdesk@mssm.edu.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

An update to your book suggestions for the grant-funded collection additions

We have an exciting update to share regarding your book suggestions for our grant-funded collection additions. We are thrilled to inform you that we are moving forward with purchasing the books you recommended. Your valuable input has been essential in shaping our collections!

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the Mount Sinai community for submitting suggestions for new titles. Your engagement in this initiative highlights the shared commitment we have to spotlight resources from emerging and historically marginalized voices and promote diverse viewpoints on a variety of topics that play a major role in health. Additionally, we extend our thanks to the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 7 for the Collection Equity Grant* which has made it possible for us to acquire these books.

We will keep you updated on the progress of these new additions, and we anticipate providing another update soon when the books are available to be check out. In the meantime, we encourage you to explore our current library collections.

Thanks again and we look forward to sharing these exciting titles with you in the near future!

Coming soon to our digital or physical shelves:

• The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands
• Automating Inequality
• Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change
• Change your Brain, Change your Life
• Children's Health and the Peril of Climate Change
• Climate Change and the People's Health
• The Creative Arts in Palliative Care
• The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills
• Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
• The Drama of DNA: Narrative Genomics
• Extra Life: A Short Story of Living Longer
• The Grant Writing Guide
• Medicine in Art (A Guide to Imagery)
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
• The Nature of Nature
• Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe
• Self Matters: Creating your Life From the Inside Out
• Take My Hand 
• Therapy Tech : The Digital Transformation of Mental Healthcare
• Treating Trauma in Trans People:  An Intersectional, Phase-Based Approach
• Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, From the Civil War to the 21st Century
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• Virtual You : How Building Your Virtual Twin will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life
• What is Chat GPT Doing ... And Why Does It Work?
• Your Brain on Art:  How the Arts Transform Us

*NIH Grant Support and Disclaimer:

Developed resources reported in this communication are supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH) under cooperative agreement number UG4L M012347. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Image Source: Animal Welfare and IACUC Resources guide

We are excited to announce a new guide to help you locate useful library resources!

The IACUC and Animal Welfare Resources Guide supports Mount Sinai's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and researchers with information resources about conducting, facilitating and overseeing the use of animals in research. This guide introduces books available through the library on animal research administration and care relevant to IACUC members and applicants. 

If you are a researcher, trainee or staff member involved or learning about the use of animals in research, this guide also walks you through a step by step process of how to conduct an effective search of the literature for alternatives. 

This guide links to the video recording from our recent workshop on how to conduct an alternatives literature search - "Searching and Applying Literature to Improve Animal Welfare and Fulfill IACUC Requirements" which is also on our YouTube channel along with other workshops relevant to the research community. 

We hope this guide is useful to IACUC members, researchers and anyone who is interested in laboratory animal medicine. 

This new addition comes as we continue our efforts to hear and amplify your information needs by delivering resources that are accessible to all. 

To learn more about the guide, please visit the IACUC and Animal Welfare Resources guide. 

If you have questions or want to schedule a consultation with a librarian for a literature search, please contact us via Ask-A-Librarian.
 

Your book suggestions welcome for grant-funded collection additions

The Levy Library is thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 7 Collection Equity Grant*. This grant provides $2,000 that we will use to purchase materials from emerging and historically marginalized voices and diverse viewpoints on a variety of topics that play a major role in health. 

With your help, we will enhance our Special Topics in Health and Medicine collection which currently offers topics from Graphic Medicine and LGBTQ+ Health, to Managing Mental Health and Women in Medicine.   

We invite you to share recommendations for books that you think should be available for the Mount Sinai community, especially books or topics that reflect your own interests and experiences. We are also seeking suggestions for books to help build three new themes in our collection:

• How medicine and health are portrayed in the arts
• The impact of environmental concerns on individual and collective health
• Growth of artificial intelligence and its impact on health care and outcomes.

Submit your suggestions through our online form or visit the Levy Library on Annenberg 11 to fill out the form in-person by April 30th.  We will review all suggestions and share back with the Mount Sinai community what we acquire for the Library. 

While this grant-funded opportunity invites specific recommendations with a deadline, suggestions to expand the Levy Library collection can be made at any time through our online suggest a purchase form. All suggestions are carefully reviewed considering vendor options and our available funding. 

We appreciate your participation in building your Levy Library’s collection and look forward to your suggestions.  

Thank you for engaging with your Levy Library. 

*NIH Grant Support and Disclaimer:

Developed resources reported in this communication are supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH) under cooperative agreement number UG4L M012347. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

In an effort to support the library's goal of accessibility and inclusion, we are excited to announce that users now have the option to change the language display of Research Discovery, the library's catalog, to their preferred language of choice. 

Previously, users could only search the Research Discovery in English. We have now expanded this to include a total of 21 languages including: Arabic, Welsh, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Chinese. We hope to add additional languages in the future. 

Preferred language display can be changed regardless of whether you are signed in or not. 

To change the language display when signed in, first navigate to Research Discovery and sign in. If you do not have a Research Discovery account you can register by completing the Research Discovery registration form. Once you are logged in: 

• Select the dropdown next to your name and scroll down to "display language"

• Choose the desired language 

• Wait approximately 3-5 seconds for the language to change. If it does not change, refresh the page. 

If you are not signed in, simply navigate to the "Menu" dropdown on the right hand side of the page, select the preferred language, wait 3-5 seconds, and browse. 

Users may notice new features as a result of this change. For example, languages that are written from right to left will be reflected as such when viewing an item in the catalog. 

Adding these functions comes as we recognize the growing diversity of our Mount Sinai community who are fluent in many languages. The library is committed to ensuring that all of our resources are accessible to every member of the Mount Sinai community. 

We also want to thank all of the staff who were involved in both suggesting this change and making it happen. 

If you have questions or feedback about the Research Discovery, please fill out the Library Feedback Form or connect with us via email at refdesk@mssm.edu.  

Great news for all the visual learners out there! The Levy Library now has 24/7 access to all available videos from the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

JoVE is a video library filled with 14,000+ videos that can be used to enhance your research, teaching, and training.  JoVE videos for education and training combine high-impact animations with real-life experimentation to help accelerate learning and allow you to refresh skill sets independently. Captions and transcripts are available.

Here are some helpful links to get you started:

• To access the videos, sign in or create an account using your Mount Sinai email address.
• JoVE playlists: clickable playlists of videos supporting Core Facilities and training programs.

You can also contact the JoVE Support Specialist team here if you need any help with finding and integrating videos into your course or lab.

Explore JoVE's video content library here!