PurposeThe Information Services and Systems Department at King's College London addresses information literacy in a variety of ways. This paper will review all these approaches and discuss future plans. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive paper describing a three part model of good practice for promoting health information literacy: through training delivered as part of the taught undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum; through the iGrad programme aimed at research students; and through work with the Personnel department, developing staff knowledge and information competencies via TrainIT, a suite of IT and information retrieval courses.FindingsThat the model described is robust but faces future challenges: for example, the challenge of sheer growth in student numbers and widening participation initiatives, the need to re‐model the curriculum to involve more online learning and to centre around clinical scenarios, the challenge of optimising the relationship between the National Health Service (NHS) and higher education (HE) sectors.Research limitations/implicationsIn particular, the models of assessment used and analysis of future challenges present potential for further research analysis.Practical implicationsThis paper offers many practice‐based examples of how to enhance levels of health information literacy.Originality/valueThe well developed methods of promoting information literacy outlined in this paper are worthy of note by practitioners both within and beyond the health information field.
A new paradigm for medical practice is emerging. Evidence‐based medicine de‐emphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiological rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research. Evidence‐based medicine requires new skills of the physician, including efficient literature searching and the application of formal rules of evidence evaluating the clinical literature.1
As guest editor for the December 1994 issue of Health Libraries Review, I chose the theme of Evidence-Based Practice. In my editorial I suggested that Evidence-based Practice offered tremendous opportunities for NHS librarians to demonstrate their skills in supporting a knowledge-based NHS, because many clinicians had complained that they did not have time, retrieval skills of knowledge of relevant information resources to be effective at finding scientific evidence. Librarians, on the other hand have advanced online searching skills, rapid document retrieval and delivery services, and up-to-date knowledge of the world's medical information resources and networks. These skills mean that librarians are not only well-placed to support clinicians in finding and sifting scientific evidence, but also in teaching clinicians how to search for and store information themselves. NHS librarians have not been slow to recognize these opportunities and innovative professional development programmes have appeared to help hone their skills, such as the Librarian of the 21st Century Programme in the Anglia and Oxford region. The success of NHS librarians in supporting evidence-based health care has led to their formal development in evidence-based medicine workshops for clinicians in a number of regions. In March 1996, as NHS Library Adviser. I was asked to prepare a paper for the R&D Board of the NHS Executive about how this library support could be formally integrated into the R&D Strategy. My paper was unanimously endorsed by the Board and later by the Central R&D Committee of the NHS Executive. It suggests principles of library provision in support of R&D and is reprinted below.
In the Autumn of 1989, King Edward's Hospital Fund for London embarked on an ambitious project to develop a fully integrated information retrieval system for its two libraries and several specialist information exchanges accessible to all staff via the Fund's office automation network. In August 1990, it became the first European organisation to purchase the UNICORN collection management system to which it added the BRS/ SEARCH system for a complete full‐text retrieval and library management package. One year after installation, all modules are operational, a major collection inventory, weeding and barcoding project is nearly complete and the retrospective conversion of the library catalogues is on target with completion due in less than six months. The Fund, now one several of European UNICORN sites, recently hosted the first European UNICORN Users' Group.
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