Back on the Blog Wagon

I have inadvertently taken a break over the summer from my blog as things have been a bit quiet on the training front but as it is now September I have started to feel familiar twinges of guilt so it’s time to get back on the wagon and blog on a regular basis again. Not a great deal has happened since my last post on the White Paper and in fact the White Paper parade has all gone a bit quiet lately. However people are busy writing more papers in preparation for it becoming law and no doubt we’ll be hearing more when it comes out of consultation on the 11th Oct. For a good resource on all things White Paper I can recommend nothing better than the Health Management Specialist Collection’s White Paper page which not only has all the documentation for the Paper but all the responses from various organisations and media reports as well.

I attended the HLG Conference 2010 on the 19th-20th July which took place this year in Salford Quays near Manchester. The theme was ‘Keeping information centre stage amidst changing scenery’ and there were many interesting seminars and workshops to attend and the venue was really lovely (see attached photo which I took on my first day). My only problem was that there was no wireless access and as mobile signals interfered with the sound equipment in the main lecture theatre it meant I couldn’t tweet my experience as it happened – something I had been really looking forward to! However I did have a good time, met some interesting people and dutifully wrote up my report for the HLG Newsletter which you can read here.

I went on a systematic reviews training day at the end of July which was held at Guy’s campus and hosted by information specialist staff from Cochrane and CRD. They gave very in-depth and informative sessions on the work that goes into producing a systematic review and I found the presentation on searching at systematic review level especially helpful. It certainly gave me a lot to think about and aspects to include in my Systematic Reviews workshop.

I also paid a visit to the Royal College of Physicians library a few weeks ago which proved very dramatic as upon my arrival a BBC film crew were outside the building in Regent’s Park filming a TV drama! Once I navigated my way around the cameras, SWAT teams and semi-automatic rifles into the building we were given an excellent tour of the different bits of the library, which is spread across two sites. They have a very impressive collection of both old and new stock which is accessible to all members of the Royal College and have the largest collection of medical education books in the country. Unfortunately because of building regulations they are unable to put a sign outside the building directing people to the Medical Education Resource Centre so they rely very much on word-of-mouth recommendation. In the Heritage Centre library on the other site I was especially excited to catch site of books owned by John Dee which had been stolen sometime in the 16th century and somehow ended up in the hands of a Duke who contributed his collection to the RCP. Certainly none of our books have such an exciting progeny!

As far as training is concerned it has been quiet over the summer and I decided not to run group training in August to allow myself to catch up with other things. These included trying to convince health managers at the hospital to sign up for Athens accounts (which failed miserably), tracking down some book titles for Learning and Organisational Development to buy on our behalf and promoting the Medicine Collection journals. My new training schedule was advertised last week and I have had a few takers but not as many as I had hoped! Still I suppose people are still getting back from holiday mode etc so I have to hope I will get a few more in the weeks to come. My colleague in Bromley and I are running a joint session on critical appraisal at the Queen Mary’s site in mid-October. She will be doing quantitative (thank goodness!) and I will be doing qualitative and we will be trialling a new critical appraisal technique involving Quality Street chocolates...more on that when it happens!

Graduation and All That Jazz

Well probably the high light of this week was our graduation ceremony at the Guildhall in London on Tues. Arrived bright and early at 8.30am to be robed in a very handsome black gown with a gold and burgundy sash (and cap, of course). Most of my friends off my course came (we were all full-timers) and it was a very nice ceremony with full faculty parade, brass band and all. The Library and Information Studies class came right near the end so we had to sit through a lot of names before it was our turn. I had never been to the Guildhall before and thought it was a lovely building, full of history.





Back to the grindstone on Wednesday with my first Systematic Reviews workshop and a Learning Awareness Week stand outside the hospital canteen. I had two doctors sign up for the Systematic Reviews course, but only one turned up. He was very keen though and interestingly he had already done a systematic review recently. He wanted to know more about tracking down articles and making sure he everything written on a particular subject. So I ran through my presentation and we sat down and did a little literature search later on. I'm not sure how useful the course was to him but I did try to encourage him to ask the library to help out with his literature searches! He is coming along to the Reference Management and Finding the Evidence Improvers this week (one after the other, phew!).

Learning Awareness Week went pretty well - the stand outside the canteen on Wednesday attracted a fair amount of attention (lots of freebies!) and we got people to fill in slips of paper with their name, job title and something they wanted to learn or something they had learned this week. We then made these into a long chain, which is now hanging proudly on our journals shelf! On Thursday we had a drop-in session for people to make the most of their Athens accounts but in the end only had 2 takers. Still it was worth doing and all-in-all a good chance to get out and interact with some potential users. The most interesting and rewarding part of the week for me was meeting a patient who came up to our stand and wanted to know more about where to find medical information. We had a really good chat and I pointed her in the direction of NHS Evidence and NHS Choices, both excellent, free sources of information for patients and carers.

Another higgeldy-piggeldy week

This week has all been a bit higgledy-piggeldy with assorted training sessions, meetings and planning for Learning Awareness Week (with the very scary-sounding acronym of LAW) which runs all next week.

Monday started well with a slot on the staff induction, thanks to our friends in high places. My inductees weren't the keenest I've ever seen but two full days of IT, clinical governance, fire safety awareness and child protection is enough to put anyone off. Tuesday was my second critical appraisal: quantitative research course, which I was really nervous about as I'm still not convinced I entirely understand confidence intervals, p-values and odds-ratio diagrams enough to explain them to others by my little group of three were lovely and I felt the session was very positive.

Wednesday was spent mostly in town at a meeting at the Deanery to discuss a user needs analysis survey we are carrying out. I felt slightly intimidated being a lowly information skills trainer with barely a year's experience among the great and good of the London Deanery e-Kat team but they were all very nice and the meeting was constructive. We are using the JISC Strategic Content Alliance's materials to run the survey and came up with some good questions to ask our users.

Thursday was a 'bitty' day - preparing materials for my Systematic Reviews course next week, getting some ideas of activities for LAW and general library bits and bobs. And today was just mad. I think I mentioned in a previous blog about having to recruit volunteers to carry out the training session I planned for my FILE course. Well I managed to get 4 volunteers using the bribe of coffee and donuts but alas owing to various clinical commitments and suchlike they couldn't come all at once. So I had three dropping in through various times of the day which was all a bit higgeldy-piggeldy in terms of finding a free computer to train on, making sure I had all my various bits and pieces and doing it all in 20 mins!

But, it's all done now so I just need to get one feedback form back from one trainee then I can write it up, send it off and be finally done with FILE! Next week: systematic review course, MA graduation and adventures with LAW....