Helen Carter

Biography

Having been a Deck Officer in the Merchant Navy for eleven years, I decided to try something different, and qualified as a librarian in 1999.  This is my third job in health libraries.  Helen is Reader Services Manager at the University of Oxford.

Abstract - Guidelines in practice; a professional collaboration towards knowledge management.

Clinical guidelines have been shown to improve clinical practice. An evidence base strengthens compliance to guidelines. This underlies the recommendations

contained in the Department of Health Review of Emergency Services document entitled Reforming Emergency Care, concerning the need for care pathways. This presentation describes the evolution of one element of the Clinical

Librarian project at Health Care Libraries (HCL), University of Oxford, that of support for guideline development. Pending the introduction of nationally available
protocols, collaboration between Emergency Department (ED) Clinicians
from the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, the Clinical Librarian at

HCL and an Intranet developer from ORHT's IM&T department has produced

a set of evidence based guidelines. The guidelines are delivered to clinicians at the point of use, utilising web-based architecture.  At the time of writing, six guidelines are complete and a further 38 are at various stages in the development process.

This project, between HE librarians, NHS clinicians and IM&T specialists, brings together many of the strands of knowledge management. A broad range of information sources is exploited in researching the evidence base for the clinical guidelines; this information is then critically appraised and organised into a format which is relevant and easy to use for clinical and management decision making.

The IT infrastructure in the new ED department at the John Radcliffe Hospital has proved an additional enabling factor for this innovation. It is hoped that the

guidelines will shortly become part of a wider framework of links supporting

use of the electronic patient record.

As a result of external evaluation of the Clinical Librarian project, by ScHARR and the explicit requirements of the ORHT, HCL's clinical librarian post has now become

a 'research and effectiveness librarian' post. One of the postholder's main

aims will be to support the development of protocol based care across the whole of the ORHT, this being a specific objective of the ORHT's Clinical Effectiveness
Strategy. This paper looks back on the first six months (March to August 2004) of the new post and assesses progress against the knowledge management criteria stated above, in relation to the development of  locally applicable evidence based guidelines and care pathways at the ORHT.

This page was last updated on: 5 May, 2004