Caresearch: Finding Australia’s palliative care evidence

Aims
The Evidence Based Project is a Commonwealth funded project with a primary goal of collecting Australian palliative care data, published and unpublished, from 1980 that is currently unavailable through the common electronic searching mechanisms. The project also undertook to develop a mechanism by which this literature anthology could be made available to the palliative care community.

Method
The initial task was to identify the possible sources of information that could be relevant to the project. Four sources of information were identified:

• Journal articles: Abstracts of articles from 12 palliative care journals were searched to identify articles that have not been indexed in the major electronic databases.
• Conference abstracts: Abstracts from Australian conferences from 1980 that deal with issues in palliative care
• Theses: Masters and PhD theses from Australian universities that deal with issues in palliative care
• Grey Literature: Government documents, policy and research reports from agencies involved with palliative care.

Access to the databases is through the CareSearch website. This is a specifically designed website located at http:/ /www.caresearch.com.au The primary function of the website is to house the databases created within the Evidence Based Project and to enable users to search by any word within these databases.