Feast or Famine...

Having just complained last week that it was a bit quiet it has suddenly gone busy again here in the Healthcare Library. Staff inductions have started up again and we also had a new intake of student doctors which can only mean library tours and presentations for all. We are also running a journal survey across all three sites and have had over 100 responses so far – much better than expected. I spent much time the week before last played about with our LMS so we could send out an email to all our users (who have email addresses). This will serve a dual purpose: catching people who are library members but not Athens users and seeing just how comprehensive (or not) our records are on the LMS. It will also test the capabilities of the LMS itself which is quite good at ingesting data but not so admirable at spitting it out again. Spent a while with the Senior Library Assistant experimenting and we eventually got it to run a report as a text document which I opened in Access, refined some of the data, saved as a text document again then opened in Word to insert the required semicolons needed for Outlook.

Of course when I sent my marvellous instructions to the Library Manager at our other site he sent back an email with a much easier way but the nice thing about my way is that we get all the bounced back emails, which the poor Library Assistant (and myself!) spent a few hours amending last week. It gave us a chance to clear out some old records as well so I think the experiment worked quite well...

I have attended a few meetings and training sessions the last few weeks including a CLIST meeting, a clinical governance training session (which I will talk about in a separate blog post) and the R&D Committee meeting. CLIST, held at the Bloomsbury Healthcare Library, is always a good chance to catch up with what has been going on with the other information skills trainers in London and my counterpart at another site library met afterwards to plan our critical appraisal session in October. We sent the communication out last week and already have about 8 takers! I have also recently joined the Trust R&D Committee and attended my first meeting last Friday where new proposals for research in the Trust were heard and matters around research were discussed. I found it very interesting, informative and highly professional, even though I didn’t understand everything discussed it gave me a sense of how the library could get involved in research at the Trust.

And finally, we have been in the news again – even hitting the BBC headlines last week! I have a feeling it's going to be a tough winter...

- Patients ‘at grave risk’ from poorly trained doctors (Independent on Sunday, 19 Sep 2010)

- Sidcup hospital to close A&E and maternity over the winter (BBC News, 22 Sep 2010)

Information Literacy

Well I've only been back at work for two days as I was on holiday in lovely Wales for most of the week but I thought I would still blog about them as the first day back especially was quite interesting. It was our bi-monthly CLIST (Clinical Library and Information Skills Trainers) group meeting on Thursday and there were quite a few lively discussions which got going over information literacy skills in healthcare professionals today. Two points which I thought would be useful to mention was the fact that nurses are now being expected to do Masters levels qualifications in order to progress in their careers but many are not getting the support they need to carry out this level of education. One of the librarians at the meeting (who has been in the job for a long time) was saying that some of the nurses she has been seeing recently barely have basic literacy skills, much less information literacy. They are brilliant nurses but just don't have the academic background and processing skills necessary to carry out Masters level work. The universities offer very little support and they are having to manage their very stressful day-to-day nursing work on top of the education - it is unfair on them and must be so demoralising. And we health librarians have to pick up the pieces!

Another point was about information literacy in general among staff and a CLIST member made an interesting point that the style of internet searching has changed in recent years. People using the internet in a personal capacity at home do not tend to 'surf' or explore the internet like they did when the World Wide Web first became popular. She was saying that people now tend to concentrate on two or three sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo email account etc) to find what they need rather than roving through lots of different sites and as a result have become much less certain about the internet 'terrain'. This then translates over to the work situation where people prefer to have one site to find everything they need. But in health and medicine this is just not possible.

Our afternoon session quite coincidentally was on information literacy as well and we had the ever-enthusiastic Susie Andretta of the FILE course leading the session. There were three presentations - one from Richard Thorne of NHS Nottingham City who is leading on public health intelligence course for public health professionals in the East Midlands area, another from Sue Jennings of Lancashire Care Trust who has a very exciting approach to blogging and current awareness bulletins and the last presentation came from Susie herself which asked about whether evaluation of training sessions should focus on the trainer, the user or the organisation. I found the session from Sue the most interesting - she has been using a blog in conjunction with a monthly one page current awareness bulletin with very successful results. The blog (which uses Wordpress) is very impressive - almost like a website on it's own. The most exciting thing is the complexity of the statistics available on Wordpress - you can literally see who is reading what on nearly every part of the blog and the stats are truly amazing. I was inspired but unsure how well it would work in an acute trust - Lancashire Care Trust is a mental health trust so most of the material is concentrated on mental health. I do think it might be an idea to switch our work blog over to Wordpress though (no offense Blogger....)

Today I have been back in the office catching up with my emails and getting back up to speed again. Have a busy week training-wise next week with quite a few one-to-ones. On Monday I am going into town to find out more about the Ovid link resolver and whether it will be the answer to all our link resolving problems. Hmmm, chance would be a fine thing....!

And most exciting of all - I have a new template for my blog! Thanks Blogger - now just get some analytics built in and I'll be well chuffed.

Ash clouds and critical appraisal

Well there was a bit of drama in the Healthcare Library this week when my manager was caught up in the ash cloud mayhem and ended up being stuck in South Africa for over a week when he was only supposed to be there for 5 days. I think he's getting a flight out tomorrow and should be back with us on Tuesday, a week later than expected. To make things even harder on himself he's planning on flying out again on Friday, this time to Bulgaria! I bet you never thought librarians had such a jet-setting lifestyle....

I on the other hand had my feet firmly on the ground this week and had two group training sessions - one on Finding High Quality Websites (thinking I need a more catchy title...) and Critical Appraisal: Qualitative. The websites session ended up being a one-to-one as I didn't get many takers but there were four at the Critical Appraisal. I'd already run one of these back in early March so was feeling fairly confident but this one didn't go as well. The group was very quiet and then at some point one of attendees suddenly burst out complaining how qualitative research was all rubbish anyway as it was really down to personal opinion etc etc and although I tried very hard to steer it all back to the critical appraisal checklist it really never got back on track. At the beginning of every critical appraisal session I ask everyone how they would rate the article before appraising it and give them a choice of happy face, middling face and sad face. Weirdly the same guy who complained about qual research gave the article a middling face at the beginning and a happy face at the end! Maybe he was feeling bad about giving me such a hard time but it just made me even more confused...

Quite a few one-to-ones this week and one exciting outcome from one was the potential of being asked along to the Microbiology journal club to give a little talk on critical appraisal. I have also been trying to put together my dates for group training for the next 3 months - always very frustrating as I feel I'm picking dates and times out of the air and have no idea whether they fit in with people's work schedules. We also had a very inspiring talk on Map of Medicine at the London trainer's (CLIST) meeting on Thursday so am planning on sending out an email tomorrow encouraging people in the trust to give it a go.

Also coming up this week - another critical appraisal session, quantitative this time. Which I'm dreading even more now considering what happened this week. I also may be spending a bit of time out on the front desk as our library assistant is on holiday and I really must get my new dates out and do a bit of publicity this week. And apparently the D-Day for HLG conference bursaries is on Thursday so I will have my fingers and toes crossed for that. Oh and I really need to start thinking about thr the article I have been asked to write on Twitter for the Libraries for Nursing bulletin as copy must be in by mid-May! Looks like it's gonna be another busy one....