Money (£500k) for charities from NHS England, to do self-care related stuff

NHS England has a pot of money that looks like it could be put to an interesting use

NHS England has launched the Realising the Value Programme, a new initiative which will empower people and communities to take more control of their health.

Through this initiative, NHS England will award a grant of up to £500,000 to a charity or not for profit organisation (or consortium) to identify evidence-based approaches to self-care. This programme will also support the commissioning and spread of such approaches, across local communities, and in the NHS, to empower people to take an active role in their health and care.

Interested organisations have until 9 January 2015 to apply for money from the Realising the Value programme. NHS England will be hosting and event on 8 December, in London, where organsations can come and find out more about the programme and submitting an application.

For further information see: http://www.england.nhs.uk/2014/11/28/realising-value/

Athens passwords available for some voluntary sector organisations

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Edit: 3 October 2012
See also this great question, and answers, from people on Quora
How do you get access to papers online if you don't belong to any academic institution?

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Top line: Charities / voluntary sector folk may be able to register for an NHS Athens password from NHS Scotland

I wonder if I should now be registering with all the other NHS Consortia to increase my access...

More detailed information
I have spent a very pleasant morning with my new Athens password which gives me some / limited access to some of the items below (see further down).

In June we came across "The Knowledge Network: Scotland's source of knowledge for health and care" and discovered that to access it more fully we needed an Athens password.

When I previously worked in academia I had an Athens password which opened up an entire universe of literature and databases to me and when I left, and the password stopped working, a little bit of me died with it.

For a number of years I believed that it was the Athens password which had brought me these fortunes, and I tried in vain to get another one - before someone explained that the Athens password is merely a way of accessing the subscriptions that you already have, it's not a magical 'open sesame' sort of thing.

Because I slotted into one of these categories I thought I might as well apply.

You can apply for an NHS Education ATHENS username and password if you
belong to any of the following groups :

• Staff of NHS Scotland (including contractors such as general practitioner staff, community pharmacy staff, dental surgery staff
• Undergraduate or postgraduate students working or training with NHS Scotland
• Social services, public library staff and other local authority staff working in partnership with the NHS
•Other partners including staff in higher and further education, Scottish Government staff, voluntary sector organisations, nursing homes, the armed services and patient/public representatives on NHS groups

Others may also be eligible. A full guide to who is eligible can be found here. If you are unsure which group you fit into, or feel you need access and don't belong to one of these groups, please get in touch with your local ATHENS administrator for advice.

Our charity works with the NHS and we are clearly in the voluntary sector, so I was pretty delighted to see that I might be able register for an Athens password that would give me access to some NHS resources - and so it does. It's not a very quick process to register (presumably they had to check my story out as I expect lots of people try to sign up to get an Athens password, and who can blame them).

I should add that in addition to working for a health charity I also work at UCL and so I do already have a magic open sesame password - but I wanted to see what I could get for charity purposes.

I can now access ScienceDirect which I couldn't really get at before (without using my UCL account) and it looks like I can access more databases on OVID than with our current subscription.

In short, while it's not giving me everything, it's also giving me, for free, quite a lot of what I already subscribe to (which may mean that I can save the charity some money by not renewing some subscriptions) and giving me access to a few extra diabetes journals among other things.

It's definitely worth investigating if you use academic literature and databases and work in a health charity or other voluntary sector. I'm thinking specifically of the medical research charities which are members of the AMRC (Association of Medical Research Charities).

Here's the full list, although I've not managed to get anywhere with Nature.com

Barbour Index Online Services
Best Practice
BMJ Journals Collection
BNF for Children
British National Formulary
Clinical Evidence
CSA Illumina
ebrary
EBSCOhost databases
EBSCOhost EJS
Emerald Management eJournals
GOODPRACTICE.NET
INFORMAWORLD
IngentaConnect
internurse.com
MD Consult
Medicines Complete
METAPRESS
Nature Publishing Group (www.nature.com)
NetLibrary
Ovid Online
Oxford Journals
Pier Professional
ProQuest
RefWorks
SAGE Journals Online
ScienceDirect
SilverPlatter Arc2
SNOMED BROWSER
SwetsWise
The Learning Exchange
Wiley Online Library
Wounds-UK Journals
ZETOC - BL Electronic Table of Contents

EDIT: Friday afternoon 5.30pm 10/09/2010
I've heard from Graham Steel who found in 2008 that he could access the service as someone who works in patient advocacy in a personal capacity. He also pointed me towards another blogger who commented on his being able to access literature.

The concept of an NHS Education Athens appears, from Google, to be Scotland based but searching for NHS Athens brought up this registration page for England. It seems to want you to be either at university or working in a GP surgery, so it might be a bit tougher to gain access - and of course I don't know if it's offering anything different from the NHS Scotland version. The registration page for the England one is here NHS England Athens Registration.

From Graham's blog post I also spotted that there's such a thing as the Directory of Open Access Journals.

I've also heard from @chibbie that the service has gone "out to tender for national ejournal collection".

Almost every time I write a blog post I learn something useful from commenters either here or on Twitter.

Nine point guide for #charities new to Twitter #charity #nfp

EDIT: When I first posted this I found that several accounts using Twitterfeed scraped the tweet content and added a bit.ly url or worse, an 'url4eu'. Please report any such spammers to Twitter, thanks Jo.

The shortened URL I'm using for this post is http://is.gd/8kufI
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I wrote this a year (or two?) ago for colleagues in a charity who were new to Twitter - I realise that as time has marched along these recommendations will be less 'cutting edge' useful, but they might still be helpful to some, hence I've posted ( an amended version of) them here.

1. It's been suggested that charities might want to reserve for themselves the relevant name of their charity on Twitter and on other social media (eg getting a fan page on Facebook). Seems like a good idea – I'd recommend using as few letters as possible for the Twitter channel, while still being understandable, as this will allow you more of the remaining characters in the 140-char tweets.

Also - add a "follow us on Twitter" to your website as people will visit your site and that might be the first they hear about your twitter feed; it also clarifies that it's your official twitter feed.

2. A hashtag (# before a keyword) adds a bit of focus to a word, and people can set up searches to follow instances of said word. For example I use #diabetes* if I write about something that I specifically want to be seen by people interested in that topic.

* people following the word 'diabetes' will see it whether or not I put the # symbol in front of it – the advantage of the # is for aggregator services that can collect and store all instances of a hashtag (this is useful in the setting of a conference where everyone uses the same hashtag and all the tweets can be collected). It's also useful for anyone using Tweetdeck which lets you click on the hashtag and create a column to follow it.

Probably hashtags will eventually become redundant but I've erred on the side of using them rather than not using them.

3. Find like-minded people using http://search.twitter.com/ and follow them. Like-minded might include people who have the particular medical condition your charity is funding research in, but will also include doctors and nurses (whether or not they are specifically talking about your condition) as these people are likely to want to know about your publications for example. Seek out people from your many audiences to follow and interact with.

4. Google #nfptweetup - it means not for profit meet-up of people in the third sector using Twitter. There are meetings every now and again where people share "best practice" and ideas.

5. Ask your colleagues to append something like
"Follow Charity UK 's news feed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CharityUK
to the end of their email messages because this information will then be being sent to a wide range of people.

6. It's OK (particularly initially) to post in a 'broadcast' mode – ie just saying things about who your charity is and where people can find information. You might also use one of the systems that will post an automated tweet for you whenever a new story is added to your website. After a while though, it's more helpful to be a bit interactive and engage with people, answering questions, posing questions etc.

There's no harm in writing "please RT" for "please retweet" at the end of occasional tweets and then people can do a little bit of promotion for you. People following me are interested in things relating to diabetes, librarianship and science communication so I'd be likely to RT the things people post about those, as it would be of interest to them.

7. Don't forget it takes time to build up a presence, and to 'get' what Twitter is all about. You can use it to highlight news and include a signposting link where people can read more, to conduct a conversation, to get feedback, to drum up support for a campaign etc.

If you have a presence on other social sites (like Facebook) mention your twitter feed there (ie 'cross fertilise!).

8. It's possible that a number of people in your potential readership have not come across Twitter yet so maybe a short page on your website highlighting how to get a Twitter account and follow your feed isn't a bad idea. You don't really need to write anything complicated and can probably get most of it from Twitter's help pages.

9. You can also sign up to a monitoring service, like Google Alerts or SocialOomph (formerly Tweetlater) which will send you periodic emails containing tweets that reference the keyword(s) you're interested in.

Related posts

• Athens passwords available for some voluntary sector organisations (10 September 2010)
• Healthy journalism: challenges and solutions - seminar from Patient Information Forum, at Wellcome Trust (25 April 2010)
  
• Curated posts: liveblogging science conferences - my thoughts on tweeting medical research charity conferences (16 February 2010)
• Following conference hashtag tweets in real time and saving them for later (3 January 2010)