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