John Loy

Biography

John began his career in health information with MIDIRS, the Midwives Information and Resource Service in 1989.  Following completion of an MA in Information Management at Brighton University, and a career break to backpack around the world, John joined the NHS in 2001.  Initially working as an outreach librarian and information skills trainer with PCTs in the Bristol area, he now heads up library services for the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust.

Abstract - Why don't mental health staff use library services?

While the importance of making practice evidence-based is now firmly
established within healthcare, the research literature identifies a gap in
information provision for mental health staff (1).The dispersed nature of
mental health services means that electronic resources are becoming
increasingly important as a means of delivery of information to staff.
However, not everyone has the skills, support, desire, or in some cases even
the hardware to make effective use of these new services (2)

This presentation will present the preliminary results of an original
research project conducted during 2004. The research will investigate the
above issues as they relate to the Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health
Partnership NHS Trust (AWP). Created in 2001 AWP provides services to over
1.6 million people from Weston-super-Mare to Salisbury, with three thousand
staff working from over 100 locations, including six acute Trusts. The
intention is to identify how and why staff across the region do, or in many
case don't, access library services. It is hoped that barriers to use will
be identified, and that information as to how, where and why staff would
prefer to access services will be the end result.

The research project is a two-part study. The first stage takes the form of
semi-structured interviews with a purposeful sample of staff. The interviews
explore areas such as positive and negative experiences of library services,
motivation for the individual's usage, barriers to use, and familiarity with
and training issues relating to Internet-based resources. These topics feed
into the design of the questionnaire which forms the second stage of the
study.

The content of the questionnaire will be largely influenced by the thematic
analysis of the interviews, and will be designed to obtain quantitative data
around issues identified in the interviews. 500 copies of the questionnaire
will be distributed to a representative sample of the workforce across the
AWP region, and the systematic sample will reflect the workforce by
professional groups, grades and also the geographical distribution of staff.
It is believed that this is the most realistic way to get an accurate
picture of how the workforce currently relates to library services.

The combination of qualitative and quantitative data should give a rich
picture of how staff within a mental health trust interact with library
services. Do staff working within a hospital setting, and with access to
library services on site, make more use of services than their community
colleagues? Which professional group are the keenest users? Has the NHS
National Core Content service made access to the healthcare literature a
reality? All these questions, and more, may well be answered......

(1) Blackburn, N. 2001 Building bridges: towards integrated library and
information services for mental health and social care. Health Information
and Libraries Journal 18 pp 203-212
(2) Adams, A. and Blandford, A. 2002. Acceptability of medical digital
libraries. Health Informatics Journal 8 pp 58-66

This page was last updated on: 7 June, 2004