New Database: Health Policy Reference Center

In the past year, many people outside of the governmental and health fields have spent a lot of time thinking about, discussing, and even hotly debating health care policy in this country. The passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) this spring has slowed the debate, but has certainly not ended the discussion. And here at Suffolk, we have several programs (like the SBS Healthcare Administration graduate programs and the CAS Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights and Master of Arts degree in Women’s Health ) that are very concerned about the multiplicity of issues related to health and public policy.

For this reason, and many others, Sawyer Library has recently added a brand new database from EbscoHost called Health Policy Reference Center. Ebsco calls this file "a comprehensive full-text database covering all aspects of health policy and related issues. This collection offers unmatched full-text coverage of information relevant to many areas that are integral to health policy." Areas covered include everything from Health Care Administration to Public Health to Maternal & Child Health to Health Care Financing & Economics. The database features over 300 full-text titles, indexing many more, with coverage not only of scholarly journal literature but also selected monographs, magazines, and trade publications. And, because this is an Ebsco database, it soft-links to many additional full-text sources in affiliated Ebsco databases, and also links to articles outside of Ebsco files using our Serial Solutions 360 Article Linker (look for the green dot below results entries).



As with all EbscoHost databases, it is simple to refine a large results list from a broad search by narrowing by Subject:Thesaurus Term and/or Source Type in the left frame. Or limit to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) literature by clicking the box in the right frame. Be very cautious about limiting to "Full Text" in the right frame, however, because this will eliminate many useful articles that you can link to by simply clicking that

Researchers interested in health policy will want to utilize a variety of other online databases besides this quite specialized one. MedLine with Full Text and Wiley InterScience are two examples of additional resources worth exploring. Others are detailed in our research guides for Health Administration and Medicine. And undergraduates looking for basic overviews on the Health Policy debates might find databases like CQ Researcher and Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center useful, too.

[FIND Health Policy Reference Center on the "Databases by Subject" Lists for both Social Sciences (first column) and Business and Management List (second column). ]