Poster Board Number: 4
Title: Are UK Hospital Libraries the Missing Link?
Objective: To see if hospital librarians have an impact on the uptake of access to electronic information (databases, books, and journals) purchased by the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. Membership statistics for the access scheme to the NHS electronic information (NHS Athens) reveal that a high percentage of junior doctors in the United Kingdom are members, compared to a much lower rate in those working in the community. Hospital doctors have easy access to health libraries and librarians compared to their colleagues in the community. Is the influence of the health librarians the missing factor in the difference in uptake?
Methods: A questionnaire was emailed to all the junior doctors in a large NHS acute hospital trust who had registered to access NHS password-protected electronic resources (NHS Athens) asking them how they found out about the scheme in the first instance. This was compared to the national registration figures for junior doctors and those for doctors working in general practices and in the community.
Results: Eighty-five of the doctors who responded to the questionnaire found out about NHS Athens via a librarian or the library, that is 78% of 109 respondents. There are 969 junior doctors at our trust, and we got responses from 11.2%. Of those 969 doctors, 757 have NHS Athens accounts, a rate of 78%.
Conclusions: The number of junior doctors with an NHS Athens account in England is 39,120, and the total number of junior doctors working in English NHS hospitals is 52,803. So 74% of the junior doctors have NHS Athens accounts. There are 40,269 general practitioners (GPs) in England, of those 8,566 have NHS Athens accounts, 21% of the total number of GPs working in England. NHS GPs have less access to libraries and librarians in their place of work or nearby, and we believe this explains the lack of GPs registered for NHS Athens. Author: Sarah Sutton, Clinical Librarian, Clinical Education, University Hospitals, Leicester, United Kingdom