Finding the best available evidence on COVID-19

One of the major sources of stress for health-care providers during a crisis is maintaining currency with new, critical medical information. The following are a few suggestions for registrants to find the best evidence available on questions related to COVID-19:

1. Contact the College library by email at medlib@cpsbc.ca. While library staff are working from home, the library is fully operational and staff can search the literature for best evidence on clinical or administrative questions. Articles from almost any journal can be located and emailed as a PDF (or mailed, etc.) Librarians have researched COVID-19-related queries such as prevention of physician stress, efficacy and reuse of personal protection equipment, management of co-morbidities in patients with COVID-19, and ethical allocation of limited ICU resources. To support registrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, librarians can be reached on-call by email or web form on weekends for urgent pandemic-related questions. All urgent patient care questions are given priority during normal workdays.
    
2. Utilize the College library’s electronic resources available 24/7 where there are thousands of electronic books and journals, high-quality point-of-care and drug tools (such as BMJ Best Practice, RxTx, and DynaMed), and medical apps and podcasts.
    
3. Search the literature using credible databases such as PubMed and Ovid Medline. Consider combining a search string from below that captures the “COVID-19” concept with other concepts relevant to your clinical concern. Please note that these have not been rigorously tested for sensitivity or specificity.
   • PubMed:
     "coronavirus infections"[MeSH] OR "Coronavirus"[Mesh] OR "COVID-19"[Supplementary Concept] OR "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2"[Supplementary Concept] OR "2019 ncov"[All Fields] OR "2019nCoV"[All Fields] OR "COVID-19"[All Fields] OR "sars cov 2"[All Fields] OR "corona virus"[all] OR coronavir*[All Fields] OR nCov[all] OR SARS-COV2[all]
   • Ovid Medline: 
     exp coronavirus infections/ or exp Coronavirinae/ or (2019 ncov or 2019nCoV or COVID-19 or sars cov 2 or corona virus or coronavir* or nCov or SARS-COV2).af.

For more suggestions on finding literature on COVID-19, see the Part II for Researchers section of: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)—For Beginners to Experts. Giustini, D. UBC Wiki. University of British Columbia, 2020.