My New Article

Fall Mood

Supporting Evidence-Based Medicine: A Survey of U.S. Medical Librarians, Medical Reference Services Quarterly 2011, 30:4, 365-38.
The most challenging part was to content analyze the three open-ended questions. But we did it!

Contact me if you are interested in the article.

A Student in Evidence-Based Medicine for the Medical Librarian

So exciting! I'm going to be in this 8-week program(9/13-11/5), Evidence-Based Medicine for the Medical Librarian, co-instructed by Connie Schardt and Angela Myatt. As the course description states:

"This course will focus on understanding the skills clinicians need to practice EBM, such as how to formulate relevant questions, efficiently search medical literature and evaluate the evidence for validity and applicability to the patient. The course also will focus on the roles that librarians can play to support EBM."

This is a great learning opportunity for me to systematically understand EBM and how librarians can support EBM. Thanks to the MLA CE award that made my dream to attend this course came true!

The course will cover four modules. I quickly identified my focus for each module:

Module 1: Introduction and Question Building -- study design and how to construct the well-built question

Module 2: Selecting Resources and Conducting the Search -- framework for formulating the search strategy and basic EBM terminology for searching Medline

Module 3: Evaluating the Evidence -- Appraising articles in therapy,diagnosis,
harm/etiology,and systematic reviews, and understanding EBM Statistics

Module 4: Roles for Librarians and Final Assignment -- EBM and nursing

Looking forward to the first week!

EBM Survey Results

Last year, we surveyed practicing medical librarians related to their roles in supporting and enhancing evidence-based medicine (EBM) practice and here are the preliminary results on the 11 multiple choice questions. We got a total of 596 valid responses to the survey questions with 51 % coming from hospital libraries, 42% from academic libraries, and 7% from special libraries. Some survey result highlights:

• The most frequently reported role is to provide EBM research to users, followed by teaching EBM, and contributing to EBM initiatives in their institutions.
• Hospital librarians are most active in providing EBM research.
• Academic librarians are most active in teaching EBM.
• Attending journal clubs, morning reports, and medical rounds is not a popular responsibility among medical librarians.

The survey results were presented at the Canadian Association of Information Science (CAIS) 2009 Conference and published in the conference proceedings. Here is the presentation:

Exploring the Real World: Medical Librarians' Involvement in Supporting EBM Practice

View more Microsoft Word documents from lwu5.

Our next step will be looking into librarians' comments to get some idea about what they really thought about their EBM roles.

You are Invited to Take This Survey

Are you a medical librarian? Please help me by taking this survey. The purpose of the survey is to explore the roles of health sciences librarians in enhancing and supporting evidence-based medicine (EBM) practice. Results will be reported only for research purposes. The survey will take no more than 10 minutes.

Here is the direct link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ghjbae2_2fJaeUMVJ_2bK7z0HA_3d_3d