The clinical 'end user'--a neglected resource in patient care?

In both medicine and science it is difficult to keep up to date with the large and rapidly increasing literature. Whilst a medical academic is likely to use electronic bibliographic databases for his research, he is less likely to use them in clinical practice. Although the potential advantages of an online search in a clinical situation have been appreciated for some time, in the UK it remains an under-utilised resource. In a pilot end user training project, 9 preclinical and 4 clinical academic staff were taught Data-Star command language together with methods of searching the Medline database. In the 12 weeks follow-up period only 1 of the 4 clinical staff had used online searches to help solve clinical problems. To maximise the use of bibliographic database searches in clinical practice, future end user training projects should aim to overcome the problems of the inaccessibility of computers and their command languages.