Finding health studies about the UK

I am often asked by undergraduate nursing and midwifery students, how to find UK studies.  I had got as far as thinking it was tricky, but is there anything that would help them?   An email to discussion lists told me about a filter NICE have developed and validated, which is in the excellent ISSG Search Filter Resource, which (rather to my embarrassment) I had not thought to check.  Look under "Geographic".

I was working recently with a student who needed to find other UK studies of heart valve disease, alongside a study they knew of.    Our searches, before we tried the NICE filter, were not even finding the known study.    This turned out to be because the (only five) MeSH terms did not include United Kingdom or England (the study was carried out in Oxfordshire, England).   The title and abstract also did not refer to location, only the full text did, and presumably not a section of the full text that the indexers had read.

The NICE filter demonstrates these difficulties - it includes MeSH, title and abstract words, and institutional addresses.  It includes city names as well as names for the home nations.   

The filter and paper that validates it are:

Ayiku L, Levay P, Hudson T, Craven J, Barrett E, Finnegan A and Adams R. The MEDLINE UK filter: development and validation of a geographic search filter to retrieve research about the UK from OVID MEDLINE. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 2017 34 (3): 200-216. 

(You might need a subscription or library access to read the paper, which is hyperlinked from the article title.  The filter itself is downloadable from the ISSG Search Filter Resource).

I have translated this filter to Cinahl, and the result is in another post.

I was worried that the filter would be too complicated for my undergraduates, but discussions with the lead author made me realise that if I made a "simpler" version, its performance would be unknown and it would not be validated.   So, I am not making a simpler version, instead I will tell them of the full filter, and tell them that if they change it, it will be less effective and efficient and they may lose valuable results.

The authors talk about searching for work related to a particular area of the UK, and have the example of searching for work relating to Greater Manchester.   I may work along those lines to develop a filter to find work relating to Leicester, Leicestershire, Rutland (neighbouring very small county, whose residents are often included in studies and practice relating to Leicestershire).    We don't think we have been asked about this, which is interesting, so we will see what people think!