Keeping up to date

The GDC standards for the dental team (www.gdc-uk.org/Dentalprofessionals/Standards/Pages/standards.aspx) state that you must:

• Provide good quality care based on current evidence and authoritative guidance

• Work within your knowledge, skills, professional competence and abilities

• Update and develop your professional knowledge and skills throughout your working life.

Keeping up to date with the latest evidence and guidance is increasingly challenging for practitioners. One of the key objectives of this journal is to assist practitioners in this by filtering the best evidence from other journals and providing summaries to assist their understanding of this evidence. With new dental journals appearing on a regular basis the growth in the volume of dental articles seems never ending.

Currently Medline lists some 1212 dental journals, although not all of these are indexed on their database. For this journal we regularly monitor 42 journals (see Table 1) using an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed reader or aggregator. This can easily be monitored on a daily basis to identify high quality studies that are considered relevant to the general practitioner. To supplement the 42 regularly monitored journals we also run regular searches of Medline for dental systematic reviews and trials on a weekly basis. After their initial development these searches were saved in the 'My NCBI' facility on Medline and are run automatically, sending an email with any new article matching the searches' criteria according to a pre- determined time period.

Table 1 Journals regularly searched for articles for inclusion in EBD

This approach allows monitoring of all the dental journals currently referenced on Medline. It also ensures that dentally relevant reviews and trials published in non-dental journals can be identified. These two approaches could be employed by anyone to keep up to date with published articles in their particular field of interest. Information on how to use the saved searches and automated searching facility within the 'My NCBI' section is provided in the 'how to' section of the Medline site.

Two other evidence-based resources that summarise evidence for the dental team that practitioners may find useful are; The Journal of Evidence-based Dental Practice and The Dental Elf (www.thedentalelf.net). In addition to these there are of course a vast array of face-to-face and on-line courses, lectures, courses and conferences available provided by a wide variety of providers. However, increasingly I think that we should be looking to ask the question as to what is the evidence-base they are using for their content.