CINAHL stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and it will be an invaluable source for finding the most relevant articles for your midwifery assessment tasks.  It's available in the EBSCOhost platform.

When you go to CINAHL Plus with Full Text, you will see the EBSCOhost advanced search screen. Let's say you are trying to find information on  midwifery and women centred care.  You might enter the search terms as below. When you click on Search, the results display as brief records below the search boxes:

Many of the results in CINAHL will be available in full-text and you will see the link to a pdf or other full text link below the description of the article in the drop down menu for "Access options".

Some of the results won't have the full-text attached, but you can just click on the "Other" link, which will take you to the article record in Primo Search. You will most likely be able to link directly to the full text from there.

Once you've familiarised yourself with using CINAHL, you might find that using the Subject Headings feature gives you even better results. Every article as it is indexed in the database is assigned a number of subject headings from a defined Thesaurus of terms. Searching these terms saves you from having to come up with all the possible synonyms for different concepts in your search, where you could miss something important.

For example we could look for the Midwifery subject heading.

In the CINAHL database, under the advanced search boxes, go to CINAHL Headings.

Type in Midwifery (or any term you want to try and find a subject heading for) and press Search, and you will be given a list of possible subject headings.

In this case you can see that the term we chose to search for maps exactly to the CINAHL subject heading, Midwifery. Tick the box next to that (or you have other choices listed if you prefer). You now have a couple of tick-box options:

• Explode - this expands your search to include all the more narrow terms as well as this one. Here it would include all specific types of nursing care.
• Major Concept - this narrows your search to only articles where that term is considered a major topic.
• Subheadings - A good rule of thumb here is to start your search fairly broadly and not use those subheadings unless they happen to be exactly what you're looking for. You can always come back!

Here we have chosen to explode the subject heading. Then we press "Add to search" and the Midwifery subject heading will appear in our advanced search boxes above. Now you can search for another subject heading such as "Women centered care" - select the closest match such as "Patient centered care" and "Add to search" with AND (this means we are finding the overlap of these two subject headings). Then click the blue "Search" to search CINAHL for these subject headings.

Note: if you change databases or search across multiple databases you will not be able to search using subject headings. Each database has its own specialised thesaurus, or list of subject headings.

However, if you wish to search more extensively within a particular database platform, you are able to search across multiple databases at the same time, or change databases and run the search again. 

In EBSCOhost, from any database click on the Choose Databases link above the search boxes, then select other databases in the tick-box menu.

Alternatively, go to the Library's list of Nursing databases and select the listing for EBSCOhost (Health). This will open a package of EBSCOhost databases, all with health-related content.

QUT Library has made this video explaining subject headings and how to use them.

This video from EBSCO demonstrates how to use subject headings in CINAHL