NHS Library Essentials

OpenAthens accounts are freely available to all NHS staff, and enable you to access online resources from wherever you are.  

You can self-register for an OpenAthens account, or email your OpenAthens administrator, on liaison@sgul.ac.uk to request an account. When registering online, OpenAthens needs to verify your eligibility, so try to register from the NHS trust network, or using your St George's email address.

Once you have created an account, you can easily manage your account details (e.g., change your password, organisation or email address).

Watch our video tutorial on how to register for an account. Email us with any questions.

Your OpenAthens account is the gateway to a wide range of online resources, including e-books, online journals, and healthcare databases.

Our series of dedicated guides for NHS staff signpost the most relevant of these resources.

For quick and easy access to reliable information on any topic, search the below NHS Knowledge and Library Hub as a starting point.

Search St George's library catalogue with our search tool, Hunter, to see the electronic books available to you.

An additional collection of e-Books is available through Kortext, at https://app.kortext.com/

Funded by Health Education England, the collection covers subject areas including key clinical topics, nursing and healthcare management, alongside titles on critical appraisal, mentoring and revision resources for medical exams as well as a diversity collection.

To access, go directly to the Kortext website: https://app.kortext.com, Click on the 'Sign up' option, then click on 'Sign up through your institution' on the next screen.  You will then see the option to select St George's University Hospitals NHS Trust from the list of institutions.

Once you have selected your Trust, enter your OpenAthens details.

If you need to create an OpenAthens account, or have forgotten your password, visit: https://openathens.nice.org.uk/

NHS staff have access to around 7,000 full text electronic journals covering clinical medicine, nursing, allied health,  psychology and healthcare management. Many have been purchased nationally or regionally by the NHS, but St. George's Library provides top-ups to these national resources where it's possible to extend access to university-subscribed e-journal collections such as LWW High Impact collection, Wiley's STEM collection and MAGOnline for nursing and allied health titles.

Use the NHS journals search below to check whether you have access to a specific title - login with your OpenAthens account to view articles.

Use our NHS Article Request service to receive copies of articles held in the university collection

LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that offers one-click access to the full text of journal articles.  

The Nomad extension works whenever you visit one of a wide range of websites dedicated to published research, including individual journal websites, publisher websites and popular search options such as PubMed and Wikipedia. Nomad will match information about the content available through NHS OpenAthens at your trust - and open access content - with any article you find while online, and will provide corresponding access options.

Nomad can be installed in browsers including Chrome, Edge and Firefox, by visiting the download page. Once installed, set your organisation (eg St George's), and enjoy easy access to full text.

The Nomad extension will provide a direct link to an article pdf or the full text online where available, will check access options against OpenAthens (if you need to register for OpenAthens, you can do so online), or will provide you with the option to request a pdf copy of the article from the library.

NHS healthcare databases enable you to search for articles by topic when you need a robust and reproducible literature search for patient care, guidelines, audit, research or systematic reviews.  Results from searches will, where available, give you a link straight through to the full-text of the article. The databases available, hosted by platforms such as Ovid, EbscoHost and Proquest, include:

• Medline- Ovid (General health/biomedical sciences)
• Embase- Ovid (General health/biomedical sciences/drugs)
• CINAHL -EbscoHost (Nursing/allied health)
• PsycINFO-Prquest (Behavioural sciences)
• HMIC-Ovid (Health Management Information Consortium)
• British Nursing Index - Proquest (Nursing)
• Emcare - Ovid (Nursing)
• Amed- Ovid (Complementary medicine/allied health)
• Social Policy and Practice - Ovid (Social care and policy)

Access these databases via our Databases A-Z or follow links to them on the NHS Knowledge and Library Hub. The following training sessions can help you make the most of these resources:  Finding the evidence or Systematic reviews : finding and managing the evidence. Current dates can be found on our training calendar or email liaison@sgul.ac.uk to arrange a session.

Databases provided by the NICE HDAS service were decommissioned on 31st March 2022.