Poster Board Number: 146
Title: Re-viewing Where We’ve Been, Re-thinking Where We’re Going: Hospital Librarians Contribute to Health Care Professionals Evidence-based Practice
Objective: To demonstrate how librarians working for a large hospital system with over 1,000 beds and over 250 residents are involved in teaching health care professionals about evidence-based medicine (EBM) searching, as well as to describe the methods used to assess students’ skills.
Methods: The librarians employ various teaching methods including presenting at nursing, medical, and allied health education conferences; small group; and one-on-one instruction. For many years, the librarians have shared their expertise in searching for evidence and their knowledge of EBM concepts and increased their involvement in the hospital’s educational activities. They teach at many of the hospital’s educational conferences including grand rounds, develop teaching resident rotations, and play an active role in the curriculum of the family and community medicine and pediatrics residencies. Recently, they have been asked to rethink their EBM/evidence-based practice (EBP) presentations to department of medicine residents so that they can be integrated into a new EBM curriculum. Librarians assess their instruction with feedback forms filled out by students. For some of the educational sessions, students’ self-perceived skills pre- and post-informatics intervention are assessed.
Results: The librarians teach advanced search techniques limiting results to evidence-based literature. For medicine-pediatrics interns, a baseline search is required as a springboard for discussion. Family medicine residents are given a pre- and post-search skills assessment survey. A confidence survey is used to assess some of the resident’s self-perceived skills. The medicine-pediatrics and family medicine residents indicate improvement in the informatics skills surveyed as well as increased confidence in being able to find the best evidence and present a literature review in a structured format. The family medicine residents survey results indicate that they learned how to use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), truncation symbols, and explode and focus and to limit to EBM articles.
Conclusions: The positive results launched a two-week EBM journal club curriculum in 2011. Librarians teach about EBM databases, and medicine faculty teach about critical appraisal. This curriculum replaced the didactic teaching of the past.
Authors: Ellen Justice, AHIP, Medical Librarian; Ene Belleh, Medical Librarian; Sharon Easterby-Gannett, AHIP, Associate Director, Medical Libraries, Lewis B. Flinn Library, Christiana Care Health System, Newark, DE; Barbara Henry, AHIP, Community Health Librarian, Wilmington Hospital Medical and Community Health Libraries, Christiana Care Health System, Wilmington, DE; Christine Chastain-Warheit, AHIP, Director, Medical Libraries; Lewis B. Flinn Library; Christiana Care Health System, Newark, DE
