Another foot in the door: an introduction to health librarianship
A joint HLG/LfN study day held on 9th March 2004 at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham.
On March 9, new and aspiring health librarians gathered in Birmingham to hear from more seasoned professionals about the state of health librarianship and health information resources. For me, with one entire month of job experience under my belt, it was both an enlightening study day and a welcome chance to meet others in the field. The key themes of the day were change and innovation, particularly in delivering new services, providing new resources, and supporting evidence-based practice.
Pam Prior, Regional Library Advisor for West Midlands, laid a foundation for the study day by describing the conditions under which a typical health librarian works. She noted that we face the following challenges:
The difficulty of reaching health care staff who are not based in hospitals
Communication, particularly with those lacking IT skills
Financial constraints
The need for progress in national strategy formulation
However, she also noted that IT and the commitment to professional development within the NHS present excellent opportunities for us all.
The presentations on electronic resources were helpful in drawing the audience's attention to new resources and giving us ideas about how to develop resources at our own libraries.
Sarah Greening of West Midlands Library Services Development Unit demonstrated EQUIP (Electronic Quality Information for Patients), a sizeable web site for health care information aimed at patients and developed in consultation with patient groups ( www.equip.nhs.uk ). Scott Gibbens, Project Manager of the National Core Content, guided us through Dialog Datastar, ProQuest, and Biomed Central.
Although all of the speakers were engaging, the highlights of the day for me were the presentations on clinical librarianship. The varied work contexts and day-to-day activities of Mary Publicover, Trust Librarian at Birmingham Women's Hospital, and Jackie Oliver, Clinical Librarian with Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, generated revealing anecdotes and interesting ideas for innovation in service delivery. In her work supporting evidence-based decision-making, Mary suggested that, in order to understand clinicians' information needs, it is necessary to understand their context. In addition to providing traditional enquiry services, she participates in ward rounds and in evidence-based journal clubs in her effort to extract answerable questions from clinical problems.
Jackie Oliver was given the challenge of developing new ways of meeting the information needs of primary care clinicians. She observed the following conditions in primary care:
Little tradition of library use
Variable access to IT
Varying levels of information literacy
A severe lack of time
Despite the challenges presented by this user group, Jackie delivers a service that includes literature searching, a quarterly bulletin of new guidelines and information resources, training, promotion, and the development of a clinical questions database.
Maurice Wakeham, who chaired the study day, reports that the evaluation sheets completed by delegates were mainly positive. “We rather unfairly asked who people thought the best speaker was,” he says, “and every speaker got somebody's vote.” I would agree with my fellow delegates in describing the day overall as “enjoyable, well organised, and useful”. I came away from the study day wanting to learn more about evidence-based practice and critical appraisal and feeling inspired by the positive attitude toward health librarianship demonstrated by all of the presenters.
A report by Michele Hilton Boon, Electronic Resources Librarian, Wythenshawe Hospital, South Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Updated: 10 June 2005