Winner announcement: International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award

The International Clinical Librarian Conference organising committee are proud to announce that Ms Vasumathi Sriganesh is the winner of the International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award for 2013.

The International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award was established this year, to honour a practising librarian or informationist who has made outstanding contributions to bringing evidence into practice in the field of healthcare. The award will coincide with the meeting, “One Health: Information in an Interdependent World”.  One Health is an international meeting incorporating MLA ’13 and the 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), the 7th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS), and the 6th International Clinical Librarian Conference (ICLC).

The recipient of the International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award will receive a certificate at One Health and a cash award of $500 after the meeting. The cash award is kindly sponsored by Dynamed.

Ms. Vasumathi Sriganesh  worked as a hospital librarian and later as a consumer health librarian in Mumbai, India, during the years 1992-1997, when Medline was on CD ROM and a little later, when Internet access entered the Indian scenario. She discovered that she was good at handling these resources and also that most doctors were quite so successful. She felt that there was a need to reach out to a large audience and not only her library users.

In 1997, she started off as an independent consultant to help health professionals use Internet resources. In 1999 she set up “QMed Services” as a consulting organization.  She later realized that she not only needed to offer help, but needed to do a lot of advocacy to ensure that correct literature searching, reference management and evidence based health care needed to be taught and actually included in the medical (and allied health) curriculum. She set up “QMed Knowledge Foundation” in 2007, as a “Not for Profit Trust”, so that there would be better acceptance of her recommendations and also her workshops. With the support of five colleagues, she has conducted more than 100 workshops on literature searching / searching for evidence. She has delivered an equal number of short lectures on these topics to promote awareness of the need for such knowledge. She also offers support authors of Systematic Reviews, by coordinating with Trial Search Coordinators, and helps the South Asian Cochrane Network & Centre in her country, with her expertise.

Having created web-based resource manuals, her next activity is to create E-Learning modules and also initiate Train the Trainer programs to spread her programs more quickly, in the country. Her goal is to see that literature searching skills will be included in the curriculum, and that strong library support will be available to all health professionals for the provision of evidence based healthcare in the country.

A mentor for One Health?

The International Clinical Librarian Conference 2013, is part of the 2013 Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the Medical Library Association (MLA ’13), 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), 7th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS). The meeting theme is 'One Health: Information in an interdependent world'. Boston, MA, USA. 3rd-8th May 2013.

If you are attending One Health, and are an MLA member,  you can enhance your experience through MLA colleague connection. Colleague Connection is a mentoring program that pairs newer members or first-time annual meeting attendees with returning, more experienced members. If you are a new MLA member or first-time meeting attendee, consider pairing up with an experienced colleague at the meeting in Boston. Colleague Connection allows you to have your questions about the meeting answered, maximize your time, select the best programs and meetings to attend, meet new colleagues, build your professional network, and discuss new ideas.

Experienced MLA members benefit, too! Mentoring a colleague can expand your professional network, expose you to new ideas, and help you see the meeting from a fresh perspective. Sign up today. Those who register by Saturday, April 27, will be guaranteed to receive their mentor or mentee before leaving for the meeting. Once assigned, each pair of colleagues will be responsible for working out a time to meet and connect. For more information about participating, please contact Ryan Harris, AHIP, 410.706.1315.

Thanks Sarah

Your tricky literature searching questions answered!

The International Clinical Librarian Conference, the Pharmacy and Drug Information Section and the Institutional Animal Care and Use SIG of the MLA are having an invited panel session at One Health on the practicalities of  literature searching. One Health is a federated international meeting incorporating the 2013 Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the Medical Library Association (MLA ’13), the 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), the 7th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS), and the 6th International Clinical Librarian Conference (ICLC).

The panel of invited speakers will be discussing methods of constructing search strategies, filters or hedges and will discuss the tricks of the trade from their experience as expert searchers. We would like to invite you and your colleagues to send in your questions for the panel to address. If you are attending One Health you are welcome to come and hear the questions selected by the panel, answered live.  Those submitting a question, that is chosen to be answered by the panel, will also receive a written answer to their question, via email.

You don’t have to be a MLA member, clinical librarian, informationist or an embedded librarian to submit a question to the panel, just someone who searches health databases and would like some advice from your colleagues.

Questions to be emailed to Sarah.Sutton@uhl-tr.nhs.uk by 29^th of March 2013.

UpToDate

At University Hospitals of Leicester we recently got access to UpToDate and the initital response from staff has been very positive.

Has anybody else got UpToDate or any other point of care resources?

Have you found them well received and what sort of feedback have you obtained?

Setting up a Clinical Outreach Service

Lorena Cascant has very kindly let us share her summary of responses to 'Setting up a Clinical Outreach Service' which she recently shared on LIS-Medical.

She would also like to give acknowledgements to Rebecca Mitchelmore, Jenny Lang, Lisa Lawrence and Erica Rae for sharing their experiences.

DON’T

1. Don’t hide in the library!!! Keep active, be glamorous, outgoing, chatty, sociable individual
2. Don’t get disheartened. They can be quite suspicious at first; not understanding why you’re there & how what you can do is relevant to their day to day work. It takes time to build up their trust & willingness to engage, it’s a slow start

DO

1. Train yourself: clinical training, communication skills, EBM, CASP
2. Understand your organisation, how it works, where the departments are, research they do
3. Build up contacts
   1. Clinical champions to help you spread the word and big up your service and introduce you round and start embedding process
   2. Tap into clinical facilitators or educator roles as these can be very good for getting nursing and allied health staff involved
   3. Acquaintances
4. Start small: piloting with one or two teams first
5. Try to be invited to join their meetings, teaching time, journal clubs or even social events. It enables you to not only become accepted as part of them, but give you much more an idea of what their motivations are for search requests, sets the question in context. Ward round are the best.
6. Go to
   1. Regular ward round
   2. Attendance at the weekly MDT meeting
   3. Attendance to Education or CPD meetings
   4. Quarterly complex case clinics
   5. Trust Wide Committees, gets the whole organisation to take you more seriously and ties into the EBP and clinical governance agenda (Clinical practice development committee, Innovations and horizon scanning committee, joint professions advisory committee, surgical education group)
7. Let the teams to help in the design of the service they get
8. Do library presentations at various team meetings: a good way of advertising what the library could do for the team
9. Opportunism better than planned initiatives unless you know a specific need exists
10. Do current awareness a way of marketing our services, put stuff under their nose, rather than them asking for it.
11. Do keep an eye on NHS Networks or relevant no-NHS groups or organisations you can keep an eye on for staying current yourself
12. Try any form of mobile technology you can reasonably use for looking stuff up whilst you’re with them, rather than having to wait for a PC
13. Promote all the time some high-turnover staff
14. Marketing and publicity
    1. Conventional routes of webpages
    2. Trust’s staff bulletin
    3. Emails
    4. Shared open days with the Training & Development Dept.
    5. Small stands to get into conversation at cafeteria
15. Plans for how you are going to audit and evaluate your service

Remember the summer?

Dear All

For those of us who have forgotten what sunshine looked like, here is an excellent journal produced by the Library and Information Health Network Northwest. Its a brilliant read and in this issue is a lovely write up on this summer's International Clinical Librarian Conference in Birmingham - with lots of pictures showing us all in wonderful June weather...

http://www.lihnn.nhs.uk/document_uploads/Newsletters/LIHNNK-Up_Issue_37_Autumn_2011%20.pdf

The greatest show on earth?

Paper and Poster Submission for MLA ’13 in Boston

MLA ’13, will take place on May 3–8, 2013, in Boston, and will incorporate the 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), the 7th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS), and the 6th International Clinical Librarians Conference. Submission of papers and posters (using the MLA submission system) will begin earlier than usual because of the lead times needed for international participants. Submissions for the MLA 13 opened on November 30, 2011. The 2013 contributed papers and posters submission deadline is May 1, 2012.  Final findings and results may be added to the accepted papers and posters up to 1^st February 2013, so you don’t have to have completed research to submit a paper or abstract. The same system will be used for submissions to all four parts of the incorporated meeting – MLA, ICML, ICAHIS and ICLC.

The 2013 meeting theme is “One World: Information in an Interdependent World,” which emphasizes global interdependencies in all health-related areas. “One Health” is meant to encompass not only human and animal health, but also public health, environmental health, climate change, food safety and production, and international health policy.

For access to the online submission process, instructions, and a list of section program themes, see www.mlanet.org/am/am2013/.