Mary Edmunds Otter

Biography

Mary Edmunds Otter has been an Information Librarian at the Clinical Sciences Library, University of Leicester for over four years.  She is funded by the Trent Institute for Health Services Research, and is involved in research and student education.

Abstract - Integrating Information Retrieval Skills into the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum

At the University of Leicester we have finally succeeded in giving teaching, training and e-learning sessions to medical undergraduates during their three pre-clinical years of the five-year medical degree.

The challenge has been to integrate these sessions into the curriculum and to liaise with lecturers within the School of Medicine in order to impress upon staff and students the importance and usefulness of information retrieval skills.

It has taken 10 years to reach this level of integration, starting in 1994 with demonstrations of Medline on CD Rom to small groups of students. After four years our training was compulsory and time-tabled.

We now teach the first year students four times, with a marked assessment before Christmas and culminating in a practical examination at the end of the year.

In the first semester our teaching to students, each at their own computer, is via an interactive workbook –“Information Skills for Medicine 1”- which has been taken up by other universities. An example can be found at http://www.le.ac.uk/li/teach/contents.html . Our students do quizzes and assessments, related to this interactive workbook, which are hosted within the learning environment of the Leicester Warwick Medical School (LWMS). This knowledge is immediately tested within the Health and Disease in the Population module, where the students have to use Medline to find a recent systematic review on a given topic.

Basic Medline skills are tested in the Objective Structured Clinical and Practical Examination (OSCPE) at the end of the first year.

For the first time this year we were invited to give a lecture to all of the first year students (280) . The lecture dealt with finding good answers to clinical questions which had arisen when the student “shadowed” a GP and tried to solve the medical and social problems of a selected family.

The lecture was followed and complemented by our teaching of Evidence Based Medicine resources with a mixture of interactive and small group based learning

In semester 4, students choose a Special Study Module and in conjunction with this we take a two-hour “hands on” session in which they expand their Medline skills and are taught Web of Science, Embase and PsycInfo.

The LWMS curriculum is currently changing for 3 rd year students and we will be teaching sessions on formulating and answering clinical questions, followed by a session where they learn about assessing the retrieved   material.

We evaluate our teaching with feedback forms, questionnaires and semester 1 assignments.

A new challenge for 2003-4 has been the introduction of a 4 year accelerated Medicine course for Health Sciences graduates.   Their varied backgrounds and information gathering experience has required teaching to be more flexible.   We surveyed them before and after the sessions in order to try to match our teaching to their experiences as far as possible , and have compared their resul ts at the OSCPE exam with the 5 year students.

We evaluate our teaching with feedback forms, questionnaires and semester 1 assignments.

We will demonstrate and discuss some of the problems and breakthroughs that we have faced over the past 10 years.

This page was last updated on: 15 June, 2004