You will need to continue your academic studies whilst on placement, including writing essays and papers.  You will find that you will need to use a library to retrieve information. 

If you are working in a NHS hospital, you will be able to use the hospital’s library on a reference basis.  Please get in touch with the Librarian at the hospital to see what is available to you as a student. For information about your closest health library, go to the Health Libraries Information Service Directory to search by name of hospital or geographical area.

If you have specific questions regarding searching and retrieving information for your papers, please contact our Team e-mail account at healthlib@swan.ac.uk. One of the Team members will reply to your e-mail to help support you at a distance.

Getting Information on the Internet

A number of resources are available to you electronically, including online journals and e-books.  This is obtained through Swansea University’s library, using your Athens account.

You are able to connect to databases from home. Databases, such as CINAHL and PubMed, will help you find article citations on topics you are researching for assignments. These databases link to some full-text articles – so you can read the entire article from home!

An online journal (or e-journal) is simply a journal available in electronic format.  To find out if the journal you want is available online, you can search the journal’s title in the library’s catalogue, iFind discover .  There will be a link to the online journal in the record.

You can also use the Internet to search for good information on health issues.  This can be time consuming, and the quality can be dodgy.  Please consult our page on the Web for quality websites and searching tips.

Distance and Lifelong Learners at Swansea (DALLAS)

As a Health Science student, you can benefit from the Library’s DALLAS services.  These services include:
•    Postal loans of books from the Swansea University or Trinity St David's  libraries
•    Photocopies of articles from journals to which we subscribe
•    Getting help with your literature searches

You can request this service by downloading from the DALLAS webpages.  These services are available to you at the cost of postage and photocopy charge per page (when applicable).

Blackboard Health Science Library Support     

Blackboard is the University’s Virtual Learning Environment.  You can access a library support module that includes help on how to:

• plan your literature search
• get information for your assignments
• search and evaluate the web
• write a literature review, and
• cite and reference your work
• find health statistics (Locality Study)
• use EndNote Web to cite and reference your papers

Login to Blackboard by going to http://blackboard.swan.ac.uk.  The Library module is Health Science Library Support, and it will show up under your Courses when you click on the My Studies tab.