In the 2016 equivalent of the drum roll, our new series Evidence for Everyday Allied Health (#EEAHP) launches today with a thunderclap on social media. We’re also delighted to be launching it in person, with some wonderful help from Chief Allied Health Professions Officer Suzanne Rastrick, at the Chief Allied Health Professions Conference (#CAPHO16) in London today.
AHPs looking forward
The conference will be focusing on ‘AHP Innovation Delivering #FutureNHS’. Peeping in from the outside, this looks to me like a fantastically exciting time for AHPs and those in their care. The 12 AHP professional bodies are working together to achieve closer collaboration and there’s a recognition that there needs to be engagement with AHPs nationally and the opportunity for all to help transform future care.
Forward-looking and innovative are terms that spring to mind. AHPs, it seems, don’t stand still. How quickly things move on, I thought, seeing this blog from @WeAHPs referring to hopping onto Twitter and searching the conference hashtag as a more traditional way to join the conference, for those not coming to the live stream via Periscope!
Short, sharable evidence
Rapid change. Information overload. Not enough time. I’m sure you could quickly add more obstacles to keeping up to date with research and ensuring your practice is evidence-based best practice. We recognise this and getting evidence to you, where you want it, in quick, easy and sharable formats are drivers for this new series. We’ve had a great response from nurses and midwives to their ‘Everyday’ series and were encouraged to see AHPs tweeting us to ask for their own. So here it is!
Blogs
We publish a weekly blog here on Evidently Cochrane, and this is a good way to bring you new or topical evidence summaries. We love to be able to include a commentary from someone (patient or practitioner) for whom the evidence is relevant, so do get in touch if you would like to write a blog, or contribute to one.
For launch week, though, we’ve got a great series of guest blogs for and by AHPs, to be published over the next five weekdays, with plenty to interest AHPs across disciplines. Tomorrow, you can read about social media for CPD from Naomi McVey and Helen Owen, tweet-leaders with @WeAHPs, and how you can engage with this series and your AHP community online. Next week, Chris Morris discusses the challenges, and importance, of ensuring practice is evidence-based. Danny Minkow explores some of the evidence on stroke rehabilitation. Fran Toye takes a colourful look at qualitative research and Elaine Miller, who is again taking physiotherapy to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, shows that comedy can be a powerful tool for disseminating evidence and changing health behaviours.
Blogshots
One of our blogshots in our new series for Allied Health Professionals, #EEAHP
These images with brief information have proved really popular since we first started making them last year. Blogshots in this series will be easily identifiable, as they have their own template. We share them on Twitter and Instagram, and we now have a Tumblr for these, where they can be found along with other blogshots, made by us or by colleagues in other parts of Cochrane. We’ll share them with a link to the review, blog or other resource, and with the hashtag #EEAHP.
Tweetchats
It’s brilliant to have the support of @WeAHPs for this series and we’re looking forward to our first tweetchat with them on 28th July at 8pm, on ‘Making our practice the best practice: everyday evidence’. Details to follow here. If you’re interested in hosting a tweetchat linked to our series, do get in touch!
Join in the conversation on Twitter @CochraneUK #EEAHP. If you’re at #CAHPO16 today, do come and say hello to the Cochrane UK team!
Evidence for Everyday: new for Allied Health Professionals by Sarah Chapman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The featured image was purchased for Evidently Cochrane from istock.com and may not be reproduced. Permission to use the WeAHPs logo should be sought from them.
