A UK National Library of Health?
On Tuesday 6th January I attended the Kent Surrey and Sussex Health Libraries Networks ’ Twelfth Night event. Two of the presentations there I think are worthy of record in this blog.
Muir Gray, Director of NeLH , spoke on the theme that “knowledge is the enemy of disease”. (Who first said this?) He outlined a topology of knowledge and the seven ubiquitous health care problems. He described four phases in the development of a National Knowledge Services
1) Generation: coordinated procurement of knowledge resources which
a) meet standards of quality and document management
b) meet needs that are presently unsatisfied He pointed out that knowledge production in the NS was uncoordinated and inefficient.
2) Organisation: four main components:
a) NHS Direct
b) NeLH
c) the National Core Content procurement
d) what he described as (and BentToth elaboratedas the National Network of Libraries: services from the NHS, higher education and specialists (Royal Colleges, learned societies, patient information services, etc)
3)Mobilisation: through:
a) push (e.g. e-mail to communities)
b) pull (NeLH, libraries, intranets)
c) prompt (cf aircraft maintenance)
4)Utilisation:
a) NHSU
b) evidence based decision making
c) patient decision aids
d) librarians’ attachments to GPs.
NHS organisations will need
1) cultures that manage knowledge systems
2) systems for inputting and distributing knowledge
3) structures that reflect this: for example with CKOs on senior management boards.
Machines are good handling evidence, people are good at talking to patients. (This raises the question, what are library/information people good at?
Ben Toth:
Ben stressed librarians’ role as innovators, particularly in computer applications
What would it mean to have a National Library of Health? Ben said there were >500 librarians and >3000 libraries (Muir had suggested that there were 800 librarians: a necessary preliminary job is to develop an accurate idea of how many libraries/librarians we actually have).
He discussed open archiving and pointed out that it was the NHS that led and HE that followed in the BioMed Central deal
He ran through some of the pressures on libraries, including:
• changing user expectations
• the Google effect (and mentioned in passing the increasing integration of Google with OCLC records and the BL catalogue link with Amazon )
• internal NHS drivers included the NHS elecrtoic patient record,the development of the NHS University, financial constraints, patient-centeredness and the challenge of managing boundaries between NHS/Higher Education/Further Education and Social Care
The solution he proposed was as a single integrated service harnessing the power of the >500 libraries, with a greater spend on CPD for the information professionals who run it. The NHS network needs to:
• get greater value from its spend on libraries, as the NCC deal had already done
• be open to public and patients
• save librarians’ time,
• be closely integrated with NHSU and the NCRS
From the user point of view it should:
• be online at any time,
• have n physical access points
• offer a professional refrence and query answering service
• be integrated with knowledge and learning
• have new personal and personalisable services, such as current awareness.
• have one front door withl inks with local services
• be personalisable to mylibrary
Libraries would need to develop:
• services at Strategic Health Authority (SHA) level
• shared digital reference
• standard licences.
New opportunities arise with the Map of Medicine linked to the Electronic patient record (based as I understand it on SNOMED ) and the information architecture behind these services
He pointed to the potential of RSS feeds for delivering news, jobs, gossip and research, citing the example of an RSS service for doctors in Trent, findings and wondered if Doctors.net and/or the RCGP should be developing this.
I may well have left out great chunks, but I hope I haven’t traduced the sense of Ben and Muir’s presentations. With luck, HLIN might put them up on the web soon.
Update 19th Jan: they're up now at: http://stlis.thenhs.com/hln/admin/lsmf/archive/2004/jan/january.htm
