Welcome to Palliative Care at St Basillisa's with its new look (from June 2007)... but you will only know it's new if you have been here before). This is a small site with the quite specific purpose of providing some assistance with retrieving literature relevant to palliative care from PubMed at the US National Library of Medicine.

St B's has always found searching PubMed to be a bit of a task with often overwhelming numbers of citations being returned. Additionally, finding literature relevant to palliative care is in itself something of a problem because it turns up in all sorts of places other than journals identifiable as being "palliative care" journals. You would not have any difficulty finding material in "Journal of Palliative Medicine" but would you have looked in "Krankenpflege. Soins infirmiers"?

In an attempt to capture relevant literature, St B's built a search term which retrieved an unknown portion of that literature from PubMed. Our first effort was not as effective as we had hoped, but, using work done at CareSearch, we have lifted our game and now have a search term we believe is considerably more effective. Have a look at our "search introduction" page for more information.

More information about the searches can be found in the pages under "ABOUT the SEARCHES" menu heading and the searches themselves under "SEARCHES".

Just providing the results of searches is of limited benefit and it is more productive to teach people how to do this themselves. At "about NCBI searches" is an explanation of how to set up your own system of automatic search updates and arrange to have the results emailed to you in a format you like and that is useful to you.

There are other things to be found here so have a look around and send some feedback about what you think. In particular, check out the small number of links at the bottom of the page; there is some excellent material there. Also, for some light relief, please have a look at "about st b".

In addition to using a general palliative care search term, St B's had a very small collection of searches on specific topics such as nausea and dyspnoea. This was a very unsatisfactory page and St B's has removed it. We will continue to ponder this problem but, at this time have no plans for replacing this page; unless somebody has an idea about how to do this.

St B's is tested on Internet Explorer 7 (where it looks rather hideous) and Firefox 2 (where it looks much better). St B's is encouraging users to move to "Open Source" software. "Firefox 2" can be downloaded from here.

St B's is aware that its "regular" search updates are not as regular as they should be; they are happening every week (usually!!) but not on a by the clock basis. If you would like St B's to let you know when new material has been added, email us using this link. We will also let you know when other significant changes are made or different material added. "Update please" in the subject line will be adequate and any other feedback appreciated.

top of page