Clinical effectiveness A practical guide for the community nurse By Cheryll Adams Community Practitioners'& Health Visitors'Association 84 pages £7. 50 to members of CPHVA, £10 to non-members This practical guide booklet is a wonderfully easy-tofollow text, managing to combine practical procedures or steps with clear explanations of the underlying theoretical concepts of how to achieve clinical effectiveness.

It is one of those books you keep on going back to and I would recommend it to those undertaking courses where project work or audit is the summative piece of coursework or an assignment is required.

It gets you thinking in steps that are achievable and easy to follow and moves you forward in understanding. It includes good references and clarifies definitions of terms and provides some very helpful checklists.

The reader is taken through the process chapter by chapter, questioning present practice, finding the best evidence, interpreting your evidence, putting evidence into practice, evaluating clinical change and disseminating successful outcomes. The chapters are useful independently as summary reference. Or if read as a whole within a couple of hours you will have assimilated the concepts needed to making your practice more clinically focused and towards becoming more effective.

It incorporates useful practical information on how to access information from electronic databases and conduct searches, and it has clear flow diagrams and key recommendations.

It is an excellent tool to guide pro jec t work or to pu l l together research proposals or outlines of projects. It puts the implementation process within reach of all primary care professionals and highlights the importance of information technology skills and access to information.

I would certainly recommend it for a reference guide on primary care bookshelves not only for nurses but also for professions allied to medicine.

It includes some further information points or reading lists, which are good as a starting point.

The foreword by JA Muir Gray highlights the key issues to success and sets the scene for the vision of things to come in the future, showing how, as IT develops, nurses will need to change the way they access information, communicate and deliver services.

Nurses can keep up to date and be clinically effective for their patients and carers.

Primary care trust organisations and the future care trusts in primary care settings will be measured by their clinical effectiveness within a clinical governance framework. It is the responsibility of all professionals to be proactive and help shape the new NHS.

Fiona White Nurse practitioner, primary care trust board nurse, Nelson and West Merton primary care trust.