From closet to library in the community hospital: remodeling a hospital medical library

Halifax District Hospital's Medical Library, Daytona Beach, Florida was altered from two dingy rooms to a modern, well-equipped Medical Library twice its former size by its maintenance men in six months time, with the help of the librarian's sketches and an architect student from the junior college to draw the plans.A complete renovation was done, eighteen-inch walls between rooms being demolished, plumbing, ceiling, and windows removed. These were all replaced with walnut-paneled walls, special 125 candle-power lighted ceiling, retractable shelves, more shelves for periodicals and books, wall-to-wall carpeting and fashionable decor. New furniture, tape recorders, and TWX were made possible by a Medical Library Resource Grant.The official opening was six months from the first day of renovation, with ribbon cutting, guests, hospital personnel, and a reporter from the newspaper to take pictures for an article about the most modern medical library in Volusia County.The new Medical Library is in the "core" of the Medical Education Department with space for five years growth.     

The hospital library and the enterprise portal

At Exempla Healthcare, the medical librarians and the e-Business staff are creating an enterprise information portal where medical reference is targeted, easily accessible, and supported by the medical librarians. A team approach has been essential. The e-Business department has worked for nine months coordinating technical challenges required to support personalization, targeted communications, and a single access point for clinical patient data. Exempla medical librarians have been involved in the definition and design of information access needs from the very beginning. The Clinicians Portal was the first developed, with other customizations to follow. Many challenges remain, but by definition, a portal is designed to be flexible and adapt to the changing needs of the enterprise it supports.     

Marketing the hospital library

Many librarians do not see themselves as marketers, but marketing is an essential role for hospital librarians. Library work involves education, and there are parallels between marketing and education as described in this article. It is incumbent upon hospital librarians actively to pursue ways of reminding their customers about library services. This article reinforces the idea that marketing is an element in many of the things that librarians already do, and includes a list of suggested marketing strategies intended to remind administrators, physicians, and other customers that they have libraries in their organizations.     

The hospital library committee: its composition and tasks

Since a sizeable hospital must have a library, it must have a library committee. Like all hospital committees, this one is to help maintain standards of medical care and to mediate between staff and administration. Unlike others, it clusters around one elected member (the chairman) and one employee (the librarian). A dynamic librarian can, and should, influence and inspire the committee's deliberations; and must be able to depend upon the support of the physician members of the committee.     

The hospital library: access to information for rural health professionals

This article examines some recent literature about the low physician-population ratios in rural areas. In an attempt to discover those factors which seem to preclude successful health care delivery in rural areas, it discusses a definition of the city as the place where the maximum lines of communication converge. A new concept, the "invisible city," is proposed, and the health care community in the United States is seen as an example. The library of the rural hospital, then, is defined as the location of the rural health professional's primary entrance into his own invisible city by means of professional communication through the biomedical literature.     

Bibliographic instruction in the hospital library

The nature of bibliographic instruction in this hospital library continues to evolve. As the library makes easy-to-master, menu-driven tools for online searching available to end users, the demand for this service and the accompanying training increases. The demand for formal sessions covering research techniques is also increasing. Upon request, the library offered an extended research orientation to the housestaff in Obstetrics and Gynecology in May of 1993. An introduction to the use of CD-ROM was included to highlight its usefulness for citation verification, author searches, and for periodic current awareness searches on a particular topic. The UMH Library staff strive to offer the most current and comprehensive facilities and services to their users. These include automated access to the library's book, journal, and audiovisual holdings using the Data Trek system; online bibliographic searching by library staff and end users using CD Plus MEDLINE on CD-ROM and Grateful MED software; participation in clinical rounds to provide research support for clinical care; and several types of bibliographic instruction. In addition to the informal teaching of library research techniques that the library staff offers on a daily basis, the Library at Union Memorial Hospital is pleased to be able to provide a formalized and evolving bibliographic instruction program.     

The consumer health information library in the hospital setting.

Consumer health information has become an accepted and fast-growing facet of the consumer movement. The questions now center on the feasibility of providing such information and the best way of offering this service in the hospital setting. This paper examines one hospital-based lay health library and discusses staffing, services, administration, physical facilities, accessibility, and librarian liability.     

The hospital library profile as an evaluation mechanism

The authors present a profile designed for use in evaluation of the Community and State Services Program of Tomkins-McCaw Library, Medical College of Virginia.Twenty-five community hospitals are participating in the program. For each a profile has been prepared, giving statistical information about the hospital and its library, a complete record of participation in the several parts of the program and other relevant information. Compositely, these profiles provide data used in assessing the value of various activities of the project and provide a reliable base on which activities of the project will be built.Services included in the project are discussed briefly and its two-year history reviewed.     

The impact of the hospital library on clinical decision making: the Rochester study.

In these times of economic constraint, libraries of all types are under increasing pressure to evaluate their services. Hospital libraries face a particular challenge because the goals of the health care system demand that the relevance of library services to patient care be determined. The hospital librarians in Rochester, New York, responded to this challenge by developing a research project that explored the impact of library services on clinical decision making. A systematically sampled group of 448 physicians in the Rochester area agreed to participate in the study between September 1990 and March 1991. The physicians were asked to request some information related to a current clinical case and then to evaluate its impact on the care of their patients. Senior medical staff or administrators acted as study facilitators in each of the fifteen participating hospitals. As a result of the information provided by the library, 80% of the 208 physicians who returned their questionnaires said that they probably or definitely handled some aspect of patient care differently than they would have handled it otherwise. Changes in the following specific aspects of care were reported by the physicians: diagnosis (29%), choice of tests (51%), choice of drugs (45%), reduced length of hospital stay (19%), and advice given to the patient (72%). Physicians also said that the information provided by the library contributed to their ability to avoid the following: hospital admission (12%), patient mortality (19%), hospital-acquired infection (8%), surgery (21%), and additional tests or procedures (49%). The physicians rated the information provided by the library more highly than that provided by other information sources such as diagnostic imaging, lab tests, and discussions with colleagues. In addition to confirming earlier research findings that information provided by hospital libraries is perceived by physicians as having a significant impact on clinical decision making, the results increase our store of scientific knowledge about the specific nature and extent of the impact of information provided by the hospital library.     

Trends in hospital librarianship and hospital library services: 1989 to 2006

Objective:

The research studied the status of hospital librarians and library services to better inform the Medical Library Association''s advocacy activities.

Methods:

The Vital Pathways Survey Subcommittee of the Task Force on Vital Pathways for Hospital Librarians distributed a web-based survey to hospital librarians and academic health sciences library directors. The survey results were compared to data collected in a 1989 survey of hospital libraries by the American Hospital Association in order to identify any trends in hospital libraries, roles of librarians, and library services. A web-based hospital library report form based on the survey questions was also developed to more quickly identify changes in the status of hospital libraries on an ongoing basis.

Results:

The greatest change in library services between 1989 and 2005/06 was in the area of access to information, with 40% more of the respondents providing access to commercial online services, 100% more providing access to Internet resources, and 28% more providing training in database searching and use of information resources. Twenty-nine percent (n = 587) of the 2005/06 respondents reported a decrease in staff over the last 5 years.

Conclusions:

Survey data support reported trends of consolidation of hospitals and hospital libraries and additions of new services. These services have likely required librarians to acquire new skills. It is hoped that future surveys will be undertaken to continue to study these trends.

Highlights

• Data support reported trends in the decrease in the number of hospitals and hospital libraries.
• About 44.0% of hospitals had some level of onsite library service in 1989, compared with between 33.5% and 29.1% of hospitals in 2005/06.
• More electronic services and resources, such as Internet access and online materials, are being offered by hospital libraries, in addition to more traditional services
• Library staffing appears to be more unstable today than in 1989, with more libraries reporting a decrease in the number of staff.

Implications

• Hospital libraries continue to change in response to changes in the health care environment as health care administrators respond to financial pressures, library staff are downsized, degreed librarian positions are eliminated, and reporting structures change.
• MLA must continue to track the status of hospital librarians and libraries in light of the changing environment with surveys and other means, in partnership with others such as the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

     

医院图书馆读者需求调查

对复旦大学附属眼耳鼻喉科医院图书馆来馆读者使用图书馆服务的情况进行了调查,结果显示医院图书馆读者人群以研究生和医生为主,且主要利用图书馆网络及电子资源,建议医院图书馆加强馆藏建设,加大电子资源的推广、培训和指导。