OpenAthens is a service providing you with a single sign-in for online resources provided by NHS England, your local organisation, and Library and Evidence Services. We aim to use OpenAthens, as far as possible, as an easy access method.
We recommend all NHS staff register for this service and keep their details up to date, renewing their account when prompted to ensure uninterrupted access to online resources.
Register for OpenAthens via NICE.
For ease of access and quick turnaround, we recommend that you use an NHS email address when registering. Please ensure that you select the correct NHS trust when registering, as any errors will cause delays approving your account.
If you have previously held an OpenAthens account at another NHS organisation, you can request that the OpenAthens administrator at your previous organisation moves your account to your new organisation. This will allow you to keep any saved searches associated with the account.
You cannot use the same email address to register for an account. If you receive an error message saying your email address is already in use, please contact the administrator at your old organisation to transfer or delete the account.
If you have any questions about the service or experience any difficulty registering, please get in touch with the team at nhsathens@imperial.ac.uk.
The Knowledge and Library Hub is a platform for NHS staff that brings together local and national online resources.
You can use it to search our library collections, as well as online journals, e-books, guidelines, care pathways, clinical knowledge summaries and more. The Knowledge and Library Hub also links you to further recommended resources such as BMJ Best Practice, a clinical decision support tool accessible via OpenAthens.
For deeper and more complex searches e.g. evidence searches for education, audit, research, and clinical queries, we recommend using the databases provided on the Knowledge and Library Hub. These include general medical databases MEDLINE and EMBASE, as well as nursing research databases such as CINAHL and BNI, and databases for allied health professionals like AMED.
If you need help using these resources or building a search, we encourage you to contact your librarian, book a one to one or attend a workshop.
More detailed information about the Knowledge and Library Hub and its online resources is available on the Books, Journals and Databases section of this guide.