The Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA) is a national association with over 400 members representing health librarians and library staff in Canada. Health libraries have been playing important roles in supporting the information needs of healthcare workers, patients, caregivers and the public.
The CHLA Conference held 12-16 May 2006 in Vancouver covered topics like health sciences information management issues, health literacy and searching health literature and statistics. The following were some highlights of the conference:
Dr Sherrilynne Fuller, Director of Health Sciences Libraries and Information Center, University of Washington, spoke of the trends toward instantaneous access to information due to search engines like Google to satisfy health and medical information needs. Librarians should strive to meet and respond to the information needs of healthcare workers, patients and consumers by tapping on the variety of drug databases and diseases resources and locating the right answer to questions. The emphasis on evidence-based practice created new challenges to providing quality health information to support clinical decision-making and answering complex questions from increasingly informed patients and consumers.
Dr Richard S. Rosenberg, from the Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, reviewed the social impact of computers ranging from medical information systems, technology aids for the disabled to medical applications such as CAT scanners and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He shared extensively on individual privacy and security, which is a major concern as a result of the collecting and storing personal medical information. There were challenges to the doctor-patient relationship arising from remote communication and treatment. New ethical issues which would arise from the human genome information with respect to treatments, release of information, cloning and genetic selection.
George Beckett, associate university librarian at Memorial University and manager of the Health Sciences Information & Media Service for the Faculty of Medicine, highlighted the use of data mining tools to provide valuable aids as well as to manage the increasing amount of information. These tools allow analysis of large sets of data in ways that were not possible previously. Health librarians should be aware of the potential of these tools and should be able to provide instruction on their use to library users.
Brian S. Alper, family physician and medical director of clinical reference product of EBSCO Publishing, defined evidence-based clinical reference as the provision of conclusions, recommendations or assertions based on the best current evidence. He cited requirements for clinical reference to be accepted as evidence. This included systematically identifying, selecting and evaluating the evidence and making conclusions based on such evidence.
Jessie McGowan, research librarian at the Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa, presented the Just-in-time librarian consultation service. This study investigated the impact of the librarian enquiry service on primary care practices in terms of cost-effectiveness, clinician workload and improved access to information. The service provided answers to clinical reference queries, with a focus on questions answerable by standard resources in 20 minutes or less. Primary care clinicians sent their questions via their BlackBerry or via a web-based form. Answers were recorded in a searchable, web-based database used by the project librarians. The final outcome of the study was not available at the time of presentation. It was anticipated that the results of this project may be applied to other primary care practices.
Overall, the conference was well planned and smoothly run. It provided the right environment for discussions, networking and exchanging ideas with fellow librarians. Participating exhibitors also provided many educational opportunities and overviews of their latest products.
Contributed by Sara Pek, Senior Reference Librarian, Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, National Library Board