REALISE‐ing their potential?: implementing local library projects to support evidence‐based health care

Abstract

Librarian involvement in Evidence‐based Health Care provides many opportunities at a local level. Unfortunately, the potential for innovative projects to inform future developments is generally lost by a failure to ‘pass the baton’—to identify lessons learnt and transferable principles. The ‘Library Support for Evidence‐based Health Care’ Project, funded by the NHS Executive Northern and Yorkshire, resulted in the implementation of locally responsive packages of hardware and software in six of the Region’s libraries. The opportunity to evaluate the collective experience of these sites, and to synthesize principles of good practice, was provided by a separately funded post‐hoc evaluation, the Research Evaluation to Audit Library and Information Support for EBHC (REALISE). This paper reports on how this evaluation was conducted, documents the strengths and weaknesses of the Project itself, and attempts to provide a checklist for use in similar projects. The paper concludes by outlining the relevance of the findings to the introduction of planned organizational approaches to quality (clinical governance) and the development of local implementation strategies across the UK, required by the NHS Information Strategy, Information for Health.

Working together: supporting projects through action learning*

“…Indeed, action learning may, as a by‐product, augment the evidence base for such projects in the future. This final consideration may counter criticism of healthcare knowledge management projects for being poor at ‘passing the baton’ by not using one project's experience to inform the conduct of a subsequent one 9 …”

Research or evaluation? Does it matter?

“…Surely then, as long as appropriate methods for synthesis of evaluation reports are developed and utilized, it is possible to build an evidence base, and a generalizable one at that, from the fragmentary mosaic of service evaluations. Our own experience, 11 and that of others, 17 demonstrate the value of such a synthesis even from small sets of simultaneously evaluated outreach services.…”

“…The above should not be interpreted as a blanket espousal of the virtues of research in contrast to those of evaluation. Elsewhere, within this journal 11 and through other channels, 12 I have championed the value of service evaluations. However, clearly we have much to lose if we focus only on one drawer of our evidence‐based practice toolbox.…”

International Trends in Health Science Librarianship Part 14: East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda)

“…Such evidence should be part of the decision making process in health care. Health science librarians play a key role in advancing EBM, and their participation in EBM is ‘vital to its successful adoption at local level’ 2 . EBM requires health information professionals to go beyond their traditional responsibilities; they need to identify evidence, then evaluate and synthesise it.…”

“…It aims to transform Rwanda into a middle‐income country by the year 2020. This ambitious objective will be achieved with a sustainable annual income growth above 7%, 2 , and the main tool is the development and expansion in the use of ICTs. This is the context within which the National Information and Communication Structure (NICI) plans have been developed with the following objectives: 3,4…”