Counselling patients with infertility problems

The present biomedical model of health care fails to consider the psychosocial aspects of problems of health and illness. Nevertheless, guidance and support through appropriate treatment remains a necessity, especially for patients with chronic and complex diseases. Moreover, information about the disease and its treatment is important with regard to a successful outcome. Health care providers should also pay attention to the psychosocial impact of the disease on the patient, on his or her family and on the wider social context. Counselling infertility patients adds a new dimension to this process: new reproductive technologies offer infertile patients the possibility of setting up a family, but at the cost of turning the parenting wish into a very stressful event. Fertility problems and the fertility treatment itself tend to place a lot of stress on the emotional and sexual relationship of the infertile couple. Although infertile patients focus on such treatments as providing a means to become parents, they should also be able to cope with possible failure. On the other hand, if the treatment succeeds patients should not only be guided through the treatment but also informed about possible psychological and social consequences that might affect them as future parents, their parent-child relationship and the family dynamics. If it is considered that this kind of treatment involves a new life, one might expect psychological counselling to be an essential part of it.     

Audiovisual materials: a survey of bibliographic controls in distributors' catalogs.

The current pattern of bibliographic control in audio-visual distributors' catalogs is described. Eight bibliographic control elements are defined, and the criteria for evaluating the occurrence of these elements in sixty-four sample catalogs are specified. When the distributors are grouped according to category, such as educational or commercial, the pattern of bibliographic control has three distinct clusters of elements. When the distributors are grouped by the number of titles handled, there is no clear pattern. The implications of these patterns are discussed in terms of practical library reference services. A solution to the problem of bibliographic control of health science audiovisual materials is proposed.