pulling together curated information on key health and care topics. Our email alerts are a good example of the types of sources we use in our work. Our flagship bulletin, the Health Manage- ment and Policy Alert has traditionally included government documents and statistics, reports published by academic institutions, professional bodies and charities and correspondence. As we developed new alerts on specific topics like health and wellbeing and integrated care we recognised the new intelligence and insight could be found in trade press and the broadcasting news. Our Digital Health Digest went one step further and includes opinion pieces from experts in the field.
As a way of demonstrating why we use grey literature, I’ll refer you to a long read written by our then-chief executive about a new concept called Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), first introduced in England back in February 2018. The long read was the only document publicly available explaining the implementa- tion of ICSs. It was what we referred our enquirers to when responding to requests for information to help unpack what the new system change meant for their services. Given the time it takes to publish studies on any new initiative the only additional sources on ICS were from the trade press. However, here we were careful to highlight to enquirers that some of these pieces from the trade press were personal opinions and insights.
How we judge grey literature There are a number of tools such as the grey literature checklist, AACODS, produced by librarians in Flinders University, Australia, that can help criti- cally appraise grey literature resources. A checklist includes useful prompt questions such as: “Is the organisation reputable? Does it add context? Does it enrich or add something unique to the research?”
In practice, we consider these types of questions all the time in our work. We ensure we are clear about our approach, the resources used and the merits and limitations of the sources we find. For example, if we are looking for information on best practice in delivering integrated care we might refer to case studies from specific locations or regions. These won’t be formally published but can appear in journals like the Health Service Journal or are available on NHS England’s web site. These are valid resources that could provide vital insights into lessons learnt from a new model of care or intervention which has only existed for less than a year and not yet published as part of peer reviewed research.
Our approach has been especially important when working with the current
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