Article with T-shirt potential!

My colleague Sarah Sutton, has co-authored the paper published today with clinicians working in A&E at University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust. She's especially proud as she didn't have to prod her co-authors on the title, it was all their work. She's now threatening to put this on a t-shirt. I feel a design competition coming on.


In an emergency-call the clinical librarian!
T J Coats, S Sutton, C Vorwerk and M W Cooke
Emergency Medicine Journal 2009;26:321-323; doi:10.1136/emj.2008.065011 © 2009 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and the College of Emergency Medicine.

Contacts list now online

I've finally managed to collate all of the contacts details I was sent into an online list which is located here on our web site. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to send me theirs, and if you're not on the list and would like to be, please email me.

Adding yourself to the CL Map

Go to map: Clinical Librarians Map

(ETA: You need to be logged into Google to make this work.)

(Or just to the left of this screen.)

Select Edit button on left hand side panel

This will release the option to add a marker:

Select the placemarker tool.

Drag & drop the placemarker to your location.

A dialog box should appear for you to add your details.

Click on OK when you’re happy.

Click on the “done” button on the left hand panel when you’ve finished.

Clinical Librarian Study again! And NEW on our web site

Don't forget about 8th May at George Eliot Hospital, Nuneaton.

http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk/pdfs/cl_study_day_app_2009.pdf

Also, I spent Friday afternoon updating the Clinical Librarian bibliography. I'd be interested to hear of any unpublished studies that I can add to the list.

Mapping Clinical Librarians

At Leicester we often get asked about people coming to visit us, and about who else might be available to visit to talk to about clinical librarianship. Ruth Foxlee from York (via Oz!) was asking me about this very thing only this week.

As I've been thinking about the CL contacts database, and how best to set it up, I've also been thinking about how we could map CLs so we can see at a glance where other CLs are working. I think I might have a working map here: CL Google map but I'm not totally sure I've made it work. I've been experimenting with Frappr too, but it seemed to have a mind of its own.

If anyone has any better solutions, please let me know! And if it does work, I hope you add yourselves.

Getting the best out of search filters, University of York, 26/2/09

I attended this one day course with Louise yesterday, as we both wanted to know more about using search filters in our work.

Carol Lefebvre & Julie Glanville are both highly experienced searchers & developers of search filters and ran the course really well, considering it was a new one, and has quite complex content. Overall, Louise & I really enjoyed it, but felt we needed even more time to spend on looking at appraising filters and learning about translating them between interfaces and databases. Our only complaint was that we didn't spend long enough on the exercise trying out the filters and translating them.

I tend to use quite pragmatic filters in my searching, and do it in a very slapdash way, so to learn that the real way is better was no surprise! But I do wonder how much time I would have to really make use of what I have learned. I do hope so.

We found out about the web site belonging to the InterTASC Information Specialists Sub Group, which aims to identify & share best practice in information retrieval for health technology assessments. The web site is a repository for published & unpublished filters, and Carol & Julie encouraged us to add any we may find in the course of our own searching. It also contains guidance on the critical appraisal of existing filters. It looks like an excellent resource, and I am planning to make use of it in the future.

Sarah is attending the Oxford course next week, and hopefully she'll enjoy it as much as we did.

Clinical Librarian Study Day : Strength in Depth

Cure your winter blues with nearly guaranteed good weather and some useful training!

For the Clinical Librarian Conference in 2006 we had wonderful sunshine, for the Study Day in 2007 another gorgeous day. Come to this years Study Day and see if we can maintain our record. And even if the weather is terrible we have a stimulating day to distract you from the view out of the windows!

You can find out all you need to know about NHS Evidence from our keynote speaker Carol Bewick, Engagement and management Programme Director, NHS Evidence. Then hear about the new areas Clinical Librarians are now working in. In the afternoon we will be finding the evidence that you may be missing by looking in new places and using new search strategies in practical workshops. All this is priced at a level that a credit crunched trust can afford. We even have a January Sale (early bird) rate.

This day is not limited to Clinical Librarians, anyone working in health libraries will find it useful.

Please go to http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk/CLstudydays.html to find out more and make your booking.

CL contacts list

On the UHL NHS Trust Libraries web site, we've always had a list of clinical librarians in the UK & Internationally who are prepared to a) have their contact details online and b) be contacted by other librarians.

Our web site has spam-proof software to protect email addresses.

If you'd like to be included, please send me your contact details & once I've collated enough I will add them to the site.

Clinical Librarian update

I've returned from maternity leave, just this very morning. While I unpack folders, catch up on emails & work out what to do next, here's a bit of an update from UHL. The team has had a restructure, so here's who we are & what we do:

Pip Divall
Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Management
Cardiorespiratory
Gastroenterology
Musculoskeletal
Stroke
Surgical Services

Louise Hull
Trust wide and corporate needs
Audit
Infection control
Standards, policies & guidelines

Sarah Sutton
A&E
Cancer and Haematology
Children's Services
Diabetes Care
Renal, Transplant & Urology
Women's, Perinatal and Sexual Health

Winter getting you down - we have a super day for you to look forward to!

Following the very successful Clinical Librarian Conference in York, we are running a Study Day in Leicester on May 12th 2008.

The Study Day will be looking at issues you raised at the conference, starting off with the quality assurance of Clinical Librarian services, then how we can contribute to and utilise the NLH Specialist Libraries and finally an afternoon on management issues in Clinical Librarianship, such as how to set up a service, maintain funding and negotiate for resources.

There will be lots of breakout sessions for you to discuss the topics, so do consider the issues before you come, to get the most out of the day.We are having it on a Monday so if you have anything or anybody you want to visit in the Midlands you can have a long weekend away. This will give you a chance for a long visit to the Leicester Space Centre or a day out at Warwick Castle or to catch a play at Stratford or shop til you drop in Birmingham. Alternatively you could go on a Curry Crawl of Leicester's famous Golden Mile.

The study day in very competitively priced at £75 and there will be exhibitions by our sponsors at all meal and beverage breaks so you can keep on top off new developments and collect some new biros at the same time!

Please go to the study day WebPages to find out more:http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk/clinical_librarian/clstudyday2008/clstudyday2008.htm

Always the last to know?

Am I the last to know that the National Research Register is dead? It's been superseded by the UK Clinical Research Network, which is still searchable, but registration doesn't appear to be a requirement for NHS organisations now. The link to search the new register is here: http://public.ukcrn.org.uk/search/

Hopefully the new register will be as useful as I found the old one to be.

The statement is here: http://www.nrr.nhs.uk/OfficialStatementToNRRProviders.pdf

It's still possible to search the archive of the NRR though.

New Clinical Librarian at UHL

As some of you may know, I am due to go on maternity leave from 17th January. I'm planning to take 9 months off, and intend to return on 3rd November 2008.

Louise Hull has been appointed to the post of Clinical Librarian while I am away, and she will be covering my existing clinical directorates of Gastroenterology, Stroke, Surgical Services and Anaesthesia, Critical Care & Pain Management. However, she will also be covering Cardiorespiratory and Musculoskeletal Services (which I will pick up when I return). Louise starts this post on 4th Feb 2008 and is going to be based at the Glenfield Library to begin with. She can be contacted via email: Louise.hull@uhl-tr.nhs.uk

New article on an old article

Professor J Eldredge has reviewed the only RCT in to evaluate Clinical Librairanship for the latest issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. This RCT was conducted between Sept 1978 and August 1979 - is it time we were due another?
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Giant microbes!

Are you looking for a gift for that special clinician?

Check out Giant Microbes! For the librarians among us there are even bookworms on offer.

NLH Document of the week

Taken from the National Library for Health "Document of the week"

Librarian support decreased the length of hospital stay.

Case control study looking at the effect of librarian support on patient care.
This case-control study found that during residents' morning report, where case discussion was taking place, supported by a librarian-guided, computerized literature search, the length of hospital stay for patients was reduced. The researchers concluded that "Morning report, in association with a computerized literature search guided by the librarians, was an effective means for introducing evidence-based medicine into patient care practices."
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Citation:Decreased hospital length of stay associated with presentation of cases at morning report with librarian supportDE Banks, R Shi, DF Timm, KA Christopher, DC Duggar, M Comegys, J McLartyJournal of the Medical Library Association, 2007, 95(4), pp371-373

I've just printed off & read this article through, using the CASP Critical Appraisal Checklist for Case-Control studies.

The study asked the question of whether a combination of Morning Report + librarian-provided literature search results altered length of stay, hospital charges (it's a US-based study) or readmission rates. Over 8 months, 105 patients were presented at Morning Report, and these were apparently random, as the doctors involved were given no directions over which patients to select. The comparisons were drawn from the hospital register of almost 20,000 patients admitted over the past 5yrs and 7months, and were matched by ICD9 diagnoses, age & secondary diagnoses. The results of the study show that the median length of stay was 2days in those patients presented at Morning Report (p=0.0238). The authors appear to have taken into account issues of selection bias, and the problems with matching all patients.

I've been thinking a bit more about this, and it is hard to tell which aspect of the intervention made the real difference - was it the extra interest from Morning Report, the literature search, or both? And were the cases presented naturally more interesting/complicated cases? If they were more complex conditions that stimulated interest, you'd expect more time to spent on the patient, possibly more diagnostic tests, and interventions. I suppose it all balances out, but it made me think about which clinical questions make it to the Clinical Librarian.

It's a eally interesting study, as we're always looking for ways that CLs make an impact on patient care, and it can be hard to define what it is we do. Often we're using anecdotal evidence to make a case for our necessity, and this article provides the kind of evidence that people should be listening to. What do you think?

Deep web

I have only just got around to sorting out my bag of delights from the EAHIL workshop in Krakow, in September.

One presentation that particularly gripped me was all about Deep Web - the places Google doesn't reach! From this, I found a number of useful sites, some of which I'd heard of before, but none of which I'd made anywhere near enough use of.

Here's a quick rundown:

Images

www.picsearch.com - a database for finding images, seems more useful than Google Image Search

http://friskr.com - ditto the above

Meta search engines

www.dogpile.com - searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all at once

http://clusty.com - A clustered search engine - it clusters the results it brings back by categories

www.mamma.com - similar to the above

Health meta search engines

www.medic8.com - can also browse index as well as search this one

www.webmd.com - health search engine

www.mammahealth.com - same stable as Mamma, but health related - seems very good indeed -try out the aspirin search!

Database search engines

www.completeplanet.com - searches for databases on a topic, and has a browse-able index

www.geniusfind.com - another index of databases categorised by topic.

I'll be adding all of these to my favourites & giving them a go in a real life search very soon.

The blogosphere

I've been doing a little bit of handholding with a friend setting up her RSS feeds, and in return, she's been sending me links to some really good resources she's found.

I'll be perusing this list of medical library blogs this afternoon, and will be logging myself in to add this blog!

I'll also be having a look at the wealth of medicine-related RSS feeds on Medworm to see if there's anything I should add to my own feeds. This is a search engine of RSS feeds, so it may be something I add into my protocol for searches on new and emerging clinical techniques. There's also Libworm too!

As I also do a lot of current awareness (is the right term anymore? I have heard it's outmoded) work, I am going to try saving some of my PubMed searches as RSS feeds. I'm told it automatically updates the search everytime you log into your aggregator, which sounds interesting. I can't believe I hadn't investigated it before now - I've really taken my eye off the ball!

How to use web 2.0 in your library by Phil Bradley is a book that's been sitting on my desk unread for months. I need to schedule myself a catch-up on all this new stuff!

New version of TRIP

I'm really quite excited about the new version of TRIP being launched. I use the database for almost every search I do, often as a scoping search, sometimes after having already searched the primary biomedical databases & Cochrane Library.

Here's what John Brassey has been saying on the TRIP blog:

• Much improved search algorithm, more relevant results at the top and less 'noise'.
• 26 specialist search engines. 26 today and more in the near future. These specialist search engines allow users to simultaneously search the core TRIP content plus the top 10-15 journals specific to that area. I see it as a bridge between users having to go from TRIP to the full, difficult to use Medline.
• New content, we've added a load of web 2.0 content, wikis, podcasts and webcasts.
• A trial of linking to UK-approved education. Today the UK but if the trial works we'll introduce education from around the world.
• A new category 'More' to house the new content.
• Ability to arrange results by relevance or by year.
• We've removed the big google ads banner.

There's more, but those are the main improvements.

I think I'll be using TRIP even more in future!

EAHIL, Krakow

Now that I'm fairly sure I am getting the funding to go to the EAHIL workshop in Krakow in 2 weeks time (rather than turning up & hoping they'll let me in!) I feel able to say - if you're also going, come along & say hello to me & Sarah Sutton.

Blogging the conference #2

Day Two of the conference kicked off with a talk from Claire Honeybourne, NHS National Core Content Manager. Claire talked about the new developments coming from the Core Content, and the role that Clinical Librarians may be able to play. I must admit she got me thinking about networks, and ways that we can interact with one another. There was some discussion post-conference about the use of the Clinical Librarian Jiscmail mailing list, and whether we make enough use of it to discuss the future of the profession. There was lots to think about from this, so watch this space.

Jacqueline Verschuere presented again, this time on how the Clinical Librarian can still make a difference when the evidence base is low. We often expect there to be perfect answers to the questions we're asked by clinicians, and finding a lack of high-level evidence can be disappointing, especially when you're starting out as a new CL. Jacqui wanted to spark a debate about whether guidelines are high evidence - is a NICE guideline that is based on case series as good as a systematic review?

Klara Brunnhuber and Jane McHugh from BMJ publishing group presented the results of some work they had been doing with clinicians on barriers in the EBM process. I'll admit that at this stage, nerves had got the better of me, as I was up shortly after the tea break, and I was frantically scribbling notes on my presentation script.

A CL conference isn't a CL conference with Andrew Booth. Andrew talked about the work that ScHaRR had been asked to do regarding the training of CLs. I have mixed feelings about this, because while I agree that a CL training programme would be an interesting addition to already existing training options, I do think that a lot of clinical librarianship is personality-based and cannot be taught from a curriculum.

Next up was me, so I'll gloss over that. It was a bit of a blur anyway. I talked about the Pharm-assist project we're running using PDAs at Leicester. It's ongoing, but we hope to present preliminary results at the EAHIL workshop in September.

Caroline Storer & Linda Dobrzanska followed, talking about how they have implemented SIGs - Special Interest Groups at Bradford & Airedale tPCT.

A brief presentation from Ovid turned into a lot of praise from our Australian delegates for its QUOSA product - it's on my ever-expanding list of web sites to check out!

After lunch, Sarah Lewis & Nia Wyn Roberts talked about how they've set up & evaluated peer support sessions in Thames Valley & Hampshire. It's something we've tried in Leicester, based on the Vanderbilt "SearchTalk" sessions that Becky Jerome & colleagues told us about at "Lost in Space"in 2006. I found this talk really interesting, and hope we can get back to doing our sessions again soon.

Following on in the peer support/networking theme, Debra Thornton & James Allen talked to us about how they've set up a journal club for librarians in the North West, based on the principles of clinical journal clubs that they've attended. The idea of practising what you preach in terms of evidence-based practice came across loud and clear! This was another inspiring talk - there'll hardly be any time left for the searching once we've done all this.

Brenda Goddard & Helen Williams talked to us about the way they've restructed library services at Winchester & Eastleigh to reflect more outreach work. This was an interesting presentation in that it was recognised that the library assistants pretty much run the library as a physical resource while librarians go out & gatecrash clinical meetings. Some of it did feel to me like preaching to the converted, as I'm quite well practised in the art of gatecrashing! Hopefully it inpsired the more reticent among us to get out there.

Finally, we broke off into three workshop sessions. I attended Sara Clarke's workshop on the way in which NLH Specialist Libraries and CLs can work together. I'd previously been quite wary of Specialist Libraries, thinking that they were attempting to virtually replace CLs, but after some discussion, we realised that there are ways in which we can complement each other. With the potential for personalisation of the Specialist Libraries, there may be ways of promoting CL services to users from the Trusts that have them.

All in all, I found it to be an exhausting & inspiring two days. I find that being a CL can be quite isolating, even in a Trust where there is more than one of us, so it is always reassuring to know that there are more of us out there, all facing very similar problems.

I hope that the presentations will soon be available on the web site. http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk > Clinical Librarians > Study Days