What is NRC+?

Nursing Reference Center Plus is a point-of-care tool for nurses. It provides easy access to high quality, synthesized evidence to support patient care decisions in the clinical setting. Please use this database as one of your starting places for evidence based practice.

Direct link to the database (Login with SID and PIN)

https://columbiabasin.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?profile=nup

You can either click on the CC link in the video player to view "Subtitles/Closed Captions" or use the attached transcript below.

Transcript:

Hello, I am Ying. In this video, I’ll talk about what is Nursing Reference Center Plus (NRC+) and show you how to use it to quickly find current information on evidence-based nursing best practices.

From the Health Sciences Library homepage, scroll down and click on Health Sciences Databases. The A-Z databases list opens up. NRC+ is listed as one of the best bets. It is a point-of-care tool for nurses. It provides easy access to high quality, synthesized evidence to support patient care decisions in the clinical setting. I’ll click on the link and the login page appears. You will login with your student ID and PIN number.

This is the homepage of NRC+. Suppose my assignment is to find evidence to support patient care in the long term care setting. I am not sure what topics to focus on yet, so I will start with a very general search. Usually it works best to start with a single keyword or phrase as opposed to typing in a long sentence. I’ll type long term care in the search box at the top of the screen to search all contents. Click on Search.

The search results page appears. I’ll browse through these. The first three results all look interesting to me. Number 10 looks good too. It is a good idea to click on Next page to browse more results. I found #11 to be quite relevant as well. Let’s click on the HTML Full Text link under number 11. This is an Evidence-Based Care Sheet, which includes four major sections: “What We Know”, What We Can Do, References, and Reviewer(s). At the top of the full text, there is a Listen toolbar which will read out aloud the entire document for you. Evidence-Based Care Sheet lists in bullet points summarized statements.

When there is a number at the end of a statement, I can click on it to jump to the reference to the original document. I’ll click on #4 and I can see that it references a 2010 article published on Quality & Safety in Health Care. At the end of the citation, there is a code R. When I click on the letter R, the Coding Matrix opens up. This shows me codes for different types of publication and their levels of strength as evidence. Here I can see that M stands for Published meta-analysis, which shows strongest evidence. SRs, systematic reviews and RCTs (randomized controlled trials) and R (published research) also provide strong evidence, while GI general information and CP conference proceedings provide relatively weaker evidence.

Now let me go back to page 1 of the results list by clicking on Result List and go back to the previous page. I’ll take a look at a quick lesson. I’ll click on the HTML Full Text link under #1 Pressure Injuries and Long-Term Care. Quick lessons follow the format listed in the table of contents. I can use the Content links to jump to different sections such as Signs and Symptoms, assessment, treatment goals, etc. Food for thought section could be very useful too. For example, I can see that current discussions in this topic area include terminology use of pressure injury instead of pressure ulcer, Braden scale, Malnutrition, and nurse staffing level.

Of course, I’ll also browse the very important references section. Here I can see some sources have full text links. Some are pdfs from the web and there is also an EBSCOhost Full Text link for #9, which is a meta-analysis, the strongest evidence as we just learnt. I’ll click on EBSCOhost Full Text link and it opened a new tab to try to link to the full text in a difference database. In this case, the article is from Academic Search Complete. Sometimes the link may not work smoothly. Don’t assume that we do not have the full text if the link doesn’t work. You can do a quick search using the article title in OneSearch or use Google Scholar to see if there is a free, open access full text available. Details on how to do that can be found in another video called Chasing Citations. Also keep in mind that you can request an article full text from the library for free and we’ll try to get it from another library if we don’t have access.

Fortunately this time the link worked and I can see the PDF full text. I can download or print this PDF out or click on the Detailed Record and then click on Permalink and shorten the link. I’ll then copy and paste the link into a word document to keep track of my research. Do not use the URL in the browser window that starts with libaccess.columbiabasin.edu because it will not work after a while. Using the permalink which means permanent link, the link should always work after asking you to login first. While I am here, I’ll also copy and paste the APA citation by clicking on the cite link to the right. The computer generated citation probably isn’t perfect, but it is a good starting point. I can see that this citation is pretty good except for the DOI link, which shouldn’t start with libaccess. I am going to go back to the NRC+ tab now.

If you want to print out the Quick Lesson, I recommend you use the PDF Full Text. As you can see, PDF has a nice format for printing. However, it doesn’t include the link to cross link to full text found in other EBSCOhost databases. It does include links to web documents. Now, I’ll click on Result List to go back. I’d like to point out that you can filter your results by Material Type on the left side. In addition to the most common Evidence-Based Care Sheets, Quick Lessons, and Nursing Skills, I can limit to Cultural Competencies and take a look at that. I might also want to check out the two care plans as well. These definitely give me more research topic ideas.

There is also a mobile app for NRC+. Click on the Nursing Reference Center Plus icon on the top left corner to go back to the homepage. Then click on the NRC Plus iPhone and Android Apps: Learn More! Link and follow the instruction. The link is also at the bottom of the homepage. The App will allow offline use of the content and includes All Quick Lessons, Evidence-Based Care Sheets, Nursing Practice and Skills, Skill Competency Checklists, and access to Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses.

In summary, NRC+ is a point-of-care tool to help clinicians quickly find evidence already evaluated and summarized from the literature. You can use it to brainstorm research ideas and use NRC+ articles as starting points by following their references.

If you want to search the nursing literature directly, I would recommend you to watch my tutorials on CINAHL and Health Sciences OneSearch next.Thank you watching and please use Chat with a Librarian on the library’s homepage if you have any questions.