Mental Health Nursing Journal Club
Hosted by Alan Simpson, with support from Una Foye
As you will have noticed the KCL buildings have been closed down and we are all working from home, so there haven't been any research meetings happening. To keep involved in recent research and topics that are of interest personally and professionally (and to keep connected across faculties) our team from the department of Mental Health Nursing at KCL, IOPPN and SLaM have decided to run a journal club. We hope these journal clubs can help keep link us together with our colleagues across our mental health networks and to learn for our different experiences.
We aim to run these sessions on the third Wednesday of every month (Dec dates may be affected by Christmas holidays).
For dates and updates please contact Una at una [dot] foye [at] kcl [dot] ac [dot] uk.
Further information
What is a Journal Club?
Online journal clubs have become an innovative and interactive way of staying up-to-date with the latest research over recent years. Taking inspiration from ‘traditional’ journal club format, this Virtual Journal Club encourages an open discussion of recently published articles in the field of Mental Health and Nursing, covering both general research and more clinical and practice-based topics.
How does it work?
A recent research publication, and associated blogs, podcasts and/or youtube videos where possible, will be shared a week before the journal club that we will then come together as a group for discussion. If the paper was not originally published open access, it will be made free to access for you to access for the journal club.
The discussion will not be completely focused on the research paper provided but will also focus on aspects of how the topic links to practice, your opinions on the topic more widely and the gaps that the research and/or practice have.
How can I join in?
We will send you the paper, blogs, podcasts and/or links a week before the journal club along with details of the time and link to the virtual meeting (with details of how to join). We hope you will be able to join us via video link to make this as much like a face-to-face meeting but understand some people may not have the technology to do so, therefore you can also join and use the comments section to interact during the journal club. We will have a member of our team helping facilitate comments and emails to help if you have any technology issues so don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with this virtual world, we are all navigating this together.
Why join?
These are odd times where many of us are a little isolated. We want to help connect people with their colleagues and exercise the brain muscle. Times aren’t ‘normal’ so we thought why not try something you might not normally do – like join a journal club!
What will happen?
We want this journal club to be informal, interesting and useful. We aren’t asking you to write an essay about the topic, we won’t be testing your knowledge about the topic, it is a friendly environment to have a discussion about your views about the given topic. The discussions may ask questions such as:
- Are you surprised by these findings?
- What are the policy implications?
- How might these findings impact on your practice?
- What are the main strengths and limitations of this study?
- What would you do next?
To make it more useful to your practice we want to know what topics you find important and to help us build this journal club to be the most useful for you so we will be asking for your views on what topics we choose each week and for feedback as to how we can make this journal club more useful, interesting and fun for you!
Critical Appraisal Tools that might help reading the papers critically:
- The Joanna Briggs Institute
- Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP)
- BestBets
- How to read a paper: the basics of evidence-based medicine
