Gale Health and Wellness

Series: Our favourite State Library eresources.

People often ask us what our most loved eresources are. Admittedly we all have a favourite, or two, or three. It’s hard to pick as there are so many wonderful State Library eresources available. In this series our Librarians and Library Technicians share with you their most favourite eresources and how they’ve been used to solve research queries.

Next in the series we look at Gale Health and Wellness, a big favourite of Library Technician Jennie.

So why is Gale Health and Wellness, so fabulous?

It is a trusted source of information on your health and wellness that is easily understood, accurate and up to date. With this database you can watch a video about mindfulness, look up current information on COVID19, and even look at the latest statistical data; listen to information via audio, read an academic journal on latest treatments and more. It’s all in one.

Best of all, you can access Gale Health and Wellness online from home with your free State Library membership. 

Gale Health and Wellness provides access to reference material, multimedia, magazines, journals, and pamphlets from a wide variety of authoritative medical sources. It’s perfect for everyone to use. It provides its users with access to current authoritative health-related issues, from current disease and disorder information to in-depth coverage of alternative medical practices. You can browse over 326 topics; and it has an A-Z on specific medical conditions or disease. You can even search for drugs by generic, brand or trade name.

How to use Gale Health and Wellness

When you first log in you see Topics of Interest such as Coronavirus, transgender health and fluoridation. This is updated regularly. The Topics of Interest links to hot topics from the home page. 

You can Browse Topics on the home page where you can explore categories within a topic and connections between subjects or click on Browse Topics in the banner to view all topics. This enables you to uncover other topics and relevant results to match. For example, if you click on the topic Exercise you will find information and links to physical activity, exercise for better sleep and obesity. It even displays Related Topics: Heart disease, nutrition, physical therapy and yoga. 

In Browse Topics you can also choose to view categories separately such as:

• new or updated
• diagnostics & tests
• disease & conditions 
• drugs
• mental health
• therapies, treatment, and surgeries

From here you can search an array of health-related issues. A broad range of conditions and topics can be searched such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, epilepsy, cataract surgery, radiation therapy, caffeine, teens and depression to name a few.

At the top of the page Gale Health and Wellness allows you to access content using a basic search or advanced search. Basic search enables you to search across the entire resource for a singular word such as Asthma. Advanced search allows you to do more complex searches such as “cancer AND smoking”. Advance search lets you search by author, subject, document type, keyword, title, by date and more. This helps you to refine your search and narrow your results.

Other features

Gale Health and Wellness has many great features, including being accessibility friendly, such as: 

• Read-a loud text-to speech technology
• Access information with increase/decrease in font size
• Streaming audio from trusted news and research sources and download to mp3
• Streaming video from trusted research resources
• Images: photographs, illustrations, diagrams and more
• Select 'Translate' to view a machine translation of the document into your preferred language eg English, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and more
• Access to scholarly, academic medical journals and peer reviewed
• Magazines that are general interest health magazines
• News that has articles from a variety of health-related newsletters, newspapers, and newswires
• Email, download articles, print formatted
• Highlight & notes – choose a colour to highlight your notes.
• 'Access to Get link' that allows you to create a URL back to any page you choose.
• Citation tool with export feature to a variety of tools or simple paste it into your bibliography

The accessibility features in this database are wonderful. I help our visitors use Gale Health and Wellness with adaptive technology and software (e.g. OpenBook software that transforms scanned text into speech, and Zoomtext computer screen magnification software with speech). The database works beautifully with the accessibility read aloud option, and screen magnification within all levels.

This user-friendly database allows you to explore your health and learn more.

So, don’t get lost on the web with an overload of health information. Use Gale’s Health and Wellness which enables you to easily search a trusted and updated source of authoritative medical information. This will allow you to have an informed conversation with your doctor.

Join now and start searching Gale Health and Wellness.

Look out for the next blog in this series #FavouriteEresources

More information

Eresources - /research-collections/information-collections/eresources

Databases - http://onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au/primo-explore/dbsearch?vid=SLQ&lang=en_US

Library membership - /get-involved/become-member

Ask Us - /plan-my-visit/services/ask-us

Library from home - /libraryfromhome