Is there a librarian in the house?

Did you know that medical librarians are an important and vital part of the evidence-based practice process? What happens, though, when your healthcare agency might not have access to a library or even a librarian? Can you still search for the evidence?

Many hospitals, during the 1990's downsizing, did away with not only nursing and medical libraries but the librarians that assisted with keeping these healthcare professionals informed. About this same time, hospital information technology departments insisted on increasing security (and rightly so) which tightened computer firewalls such that healthcare professionals didn't have the ability to complete evidence searches within the hospital. So while some staff nurses may see the importance of basing their practice on evidence, most of them no longer have access or expert assistance within their workplace to even look for the evidence.

So what can you do if you are one of the healthcare agencies that may experience this lack of access and expertise? If you do happen to be one of those healthcare professionals, then you do have some options:

1. Learn to search through PubMed but realize you won't really find everything you need.


2. Get familiar with organizations that may offer systematic reviews and best practice guidelines as well as the national clearinghouse for guidelines.


3. Go to the OU Health Sciences Center (located in both OKC and Tulsa) during weekday working hours and the librarians will be happy to assist you with doing some searches on OU's databases (at no charge!).


4. Call other hospital medical libraries that may be located near you and check to see if they are willing to provide similar services as in #3 (most are!).


5. Consult with medical librarians regarding how your healthcare organization might access the literature from the workplace--many academic medical centers will work out contracts with healthcare organizations for access to their databases (although, this is not a cheap endeavor). The Medical Library Association has some helpful information about the plight of medical libraries and how you can be involved (they also offer grants occasionally to support adding medical libraries in facilities).


6. Connect with searches that healthcare professionals across the world are doing. One such handy service is called Connotea (it's a free service). For those of you familiar with del.icio.us, it's like that except for academics. For those of you not familiar with either of those, they are shared bookmarking/tagging sites where you can label an internet article or journal with different labels like "fall prevention" or "needle safety" and then share them. The Connotea link I provided you is the "Get it @ Duke" group. I could be wrong but I think once you sign up anyone can get in the Duke group to see their tags and articles.


7. Realize that other than options #3 and #4, the information you will get will be limited so take care in making practice based decisions (for example, deciding to leave IV's in for 2 weeks based on a small study of 15 people you found on Google Scholar would not be considered evidence-based practice).

Big thanks to Betsy Tonn and Shari Clifton, OUHSC Librarians, who have taught us so much about searching for the evidence at the past two meetings. If you happened to miss these meetings, we'll go over this educational topic again September 11 from 3-5 p.m. at Integris Baptist Hospital Conference Room D (on the concourse level). Cheryl Suttles (Integris Director for Library Services) will also go over searching for the evidence. Since it's at Integris, they can V-tel to most Integris sites. To arrange this, just e-mail Susie (susan.jones@integris-health.com). We look forward to seeing you all there!

Here's a link that many of you requested at the last meeting that has several EBP resources on the OUHSC library page. Please realize, though, that some of these are databases that can only be accessed if you have an OUHSC account (I just realized this).