Indigenous Health Assignment

MBBS I

Part 2

Major barriers to improving cardiovascular health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia

Last updated April 2011 by Mick Draper

Statistics
If you think your assignment will be better if it contains some official statistics then it's useful to know that The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects information about the health of the Australian population.

You can find a link to the ABS stats using the Library Catalogue

I suggest using a Keyword (use and, or, not, " ") search.

Type in

"australian bureau of statistics" and "statistics section"

Click on Search.

This will take you to the ABS site.

There are a number of links here that might be useful including
Adult Health, Mortality, and Access to health and community services.

Clicking on Cause of death will take you to a summary which might have all that you want.
If you want to look at the complete document
The Health and Welfare of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, 2008  
Click on Downloads.

This will give you the chance to download the PDF of the complete document that includes the bits on
Access to health and community services
Adult health
Mothers' and children's health
etc

Searching for Journal Articles
Logic Grids

Write down the concepts that you are looking for.
Underneath each concept write down any synonyms or alternative terms.
You saw this approach in the Library Health Sciences Tutorial

Here the * is the truncation symbol.
A search for aborigin* would find aborigine OR aborigines OR aboriginal OR aboriginality OR aboriginals etc

Other terms that you might want to add to this grid could include
"high blood pressure"
angina
cerebrovascular
ischaemic
aneurysm*

There are lots of other terms.
What are the most likely cardiovascular diseases for indigenous Australians?

Do you need to search for the plurals of the phrases?
If yes then add these to the grid "cardiovascular diseases" etc

Databases
There are lots of databases that might have useful information.
Below are some simple instructions for using a couple of those that are most likely to be useful.

Informit Health
On the Library Home site, click on Databases.

Click on Health Sciences.

Scroll down the list of databases and click on Informit Health.

Click on Health in the green(ish) area.

Click in the box next to Health in the blue bar.

Click on the continue button.
The search screen of Informit appears.
Now you can enter the terms from your logic grid.

This is an Australian database and most of the articles are about Australian subjects. There shouldn't be any need to include Australia in your searches in this database.

Type in the terms from your first logic grid column into the first search box.
Remember that terms in the same column are joined by or.

Next type the terms from the second column into the second search box.
Type in as many terms as you think are appropriate to your search.
Single word terms don't need double quotes and can be truncated with *
Phrases have to be in double quotes to be searched as a phrase, and can't be truncated.

In my search I used general terms such as cardiovascular or ischaemic or heart, but it would be worth putting in more terms for the most common cardiovascular diseases.
I changed the search field for these from Any field to All Subject fields. This makes the search a bit more focused.
I limited the search period to 2005 to 2011.
I also limited to full text records*.

You should experiment with your terms and your search fields.
You can make your searches more specific by using phrases such as the ones in the logic grid.

My search found 91 citations (11th April 2011).

Some of the citations may be duplicates.

*Limiting to full text records comes with a warning.
The full text here refers to full text that comes with the databases.

If you don't click in Full Text Records Only you might find more citations where the Library actually has full text because we subscribe to the journals that have published these articles.
You mustn't assume that by clicking in the Full Text Records Only that you will find all the articles for which the Barr Smith Library has full text!

If you want to make your search more specific click on the link Add more terms

This is so you can add extra terms such as

access
cultural awareness
"aboriginal health staff" OR "aboriginal health worker" OR "aboriginal health workers" OR ahw
inequ* OR disparit*
comorbidit*
barrier*

I'm sure you can think of other terms.

What about Prevention or Control?

If we can prevent cardiovascular disease or control its effects that would make a big difference in any population.
If you want to include either or both of these concepts in your searches you can just add another column to your logic grid.

This translates into an Informit Health databases search

These results will be a subset of the previous search.
If you don't find the sort of articles you want try changing your search terms.

Peer Review
It can be tricky to find out if an article is peer reviewed.
First it's probably not peer reviewed if it's an editorial, a letter, a comment, or a review article.
You'll probably have to find the title of the journal and use an internet search engine to find out if articles submitted to the journal go through a peer review process.

PubMed
The PubMed database finds articles published in higher profile journals.

PubMed is available from the Library Home

Click on the link to the MeSH database.

MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings.
MeSH are added to most citations of articles to describe their topic contents.
If you can find the MeSH that correspond to the concepts you want to search, then you should find most of the citations in PubMed that are of interest.

The main concepts are Australian aboriginals, and cardiovascular diseases

Try entering the first of these concepts into the MeSH Database search box.
Click on Search.

The MeSH database claims to know nothing about Australian Aboriginals but wants to know if you mean australian aborigines.
Click on this link.

This produces a very strange result.

The subject heading for aboriginals turns out to be Oceanic Ancestry Group.

While this subject heading will work, it also includes people groups other than Australian Aboriginals.
Nevertheless we want to incorporate this subject heading into our search.
Click in the Add to search builder box on the right of the screen.

The subject heading appears in the PubMed search builder.

Now we have to restrict the search to Australia instead of all the Oceanic groups.
Clear the MeSH search box and type australia.
Click on Search.

Click in the box to the left of the subject heading Australia.

Click on Add to search builder.
Now you have both terms included in the search builder.

Now search for cardiovascular diseases in the MeSH Search box.
Click in the box to the left of the MeSH.

Click on Add to search builder.

Using this subject heading in the PubMed database will actually search hundreds different terms.
This explosion of subject terms is one of the great features of PubMed.

Now click on Search PubMed.

Your results will appear.
In April 2011 this search found 239 citations.
If you find this alarming don't worry, it won't take you long to look through these and find the articles that will be relevant to your assignment.

Click on the Display Settings link or the down arrow to its right.
Click in the radio button to the left of Abstract, but not Abstract (text).
Click on the Apply button.

Most of the citations will now appear with abstracts, and many of them will have Uni of Adelaide Online icons.
Click on the icon to read the full text of the article.

If there isn't a Uni of Adelaide online icon and you really want to look at the article contact me.

To find similar citations to the one you are looking at click on the Related citations link.

This will usually find about 100 citations that PubMed thinks are similar to the one found by your search.

What about Prevention or Control?

In PubMed when you get to the point where you are adding cardiovascular diseases, click on the link provided by the MeSH database.

Click in the box to the left of prevention and control (and/or any of the other subheadings you want to search).

Click on Add to search builder.

Now PubMed will search for article citations that have the subject heading Cardiovascular Diseases, but only if they also have the subheading prevention and control.
As well as this PubMed will find citations that have any of the more specific subject heading listed under Cardiovascular Diseases, but again only if they have the prevention and control subheading.

Click on Search PubMed to see the results of your search.
This time there will be fewer citations because all of them must have the prevention and control subheading included.

Summon

Go back to your logic grid and look at the terms you have there in light of what you have found already.

You might like to add terms for aspects of the search you haven't yet found.

From the logic grid you can generate a Summon search like the one below, remembering to keep terms that you OR together inside round brackets

australia* AND (aborigin* OR indigenous) AND (cardiovascular OR heart OR hypertens* OR isch*) AND (barrier* OR access* OR attitude* OR inequ*)

Remember you can use the boxes and other tools on the left of the result screen to reduce the number of items found.

Please feel free to contact me if you are having trouble with any part of this assignment.
I'll be on leave from Mon 18th of April 2011, returning on Wed 4th of May 2011.