Hi, Doc! Do you Really Care?

Last week, my son had to see a dermatologist for some red stretch marks developed around and under his arms. I didn't go with him as I was at work. Later I asked my son how was the doctor's visit and what the doctor said. I really expected the doctor would say something that a teenage would take as professional advice or opinion. My son handed over me two pages of information with doctor's two check marks under Striae Distensae. My son told me the doctor was going to give him some cream for those marks. From a medical librarian's eye, it looked like the two pages were photocopied from a book chapter called "Abnormalities of Dermal Fibrous and Elastic tissue." The information obviously was written for health care professionals not for patients. I asked my son whether he read the information. He said nope. I asked again whether the doctor told him why he developed those marks. He answered nope. The only word from the doctor as he could remember was he would have some cream for the marks.

Ok. As a teenager, my son might have memory problem. However, what concerns me is the information the doctor distributed to the patient. Hi! doctors, if you really care, customize the information for your patient. If you really care, use patient pamphlets not photocopy the medical book pages. If you really care, take some time and look through these trusted health information recommended by the Medical Library Association. Your patients would really appreciated your care.

Conference Goes for Green

A few days ago, I had a chat with a friend who is going to present at LITA National Forum. She told me LITA would provide a flash drive containing a complete set of handouts for each Forum attendee. I think this is an excellent idea. If MLA or our Chapter Annual Meeting could do the same, it would be much appreciated by many of the members. At least it will save time, money, and paper to print out handouts either for the conference or after the conference.

Another Podcast Live

Thanks to our summer interns Xin and Treshain, the podcast I created on searching the online catalog was updated with screen shots.

It's Because I'm an Expert

Stephanie's recent post, What Do Faculty Want of Librarians, got me looking back the past 6 years since I became an academic health sciences librarian. These are the things faculty members enjoyed having a connection with me, a health sciences librarian:

• Get full text articles, print or electronic, at the point of need.
• Conduct literature searches on their projects and research topics.
  
• Update their course materials each year.
  
• Update their dissertation references on a regular basis. Some of them are working on their PhD degrees while teaching in the departments.
  
• Teach their students on how to use the library's resources to complete course assignments.
  
• Create workshops tailed to a specific group of students.
  
• Set up automatically email alerts on their research topics or on their favorite journals' TOCs.
• Send out brief news, tips, and resources related to their fields.
  

In the past two years, I have been the library liaison to 9 academic units, including 2 colleges, 4 departments, and 3 divisions. I felt grateful and honored to be invited to co-teach with a nursing faculty in Informatics for Healthcare since 2006. I'm also a team member in this nursing information literacy grant--LISTEN. I felt I'm not quite understood as an academic librarian, though. I've tried to find ways to promote what I can do for the faculty and my departments. This comes back to Stephanie's invitation and question: "what can you do to help your department?"

Twitter for Medicine and Health

Curious about Twitter and its use in medicine and healthcare? PF. Anderson's slides give you a good review.

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