Managing Knowledge in Health Services.

Abstract

Managing Knowledge in Health Services provides a snapshot of the environment in which librarians work. It examines the issues with which all librarians are grappling: identification of clients' needs, cost-effective selection of appropriate resources, and training for resource utilization. The editors achieve their goal of investigating the “context, principles and practical skills needed to effectively manage the knowledge base of healthcare.” Booth, the director of Information Resources, School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, and Walton, librarian, Health Social Work and Education, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, bring a combination of thirty-five years of experience in a wide range of health settings. Contributors come from academic and hospital libraries. Practical and provocative, Managing Knowledge in Health Services encourages readers to think about what is and what should be, while providing pointers to print and electronic information sources for additional study. Part one describes the work environment, with chapters on health service libraries, consumer health information, and users and providers of health service information. Part two defines the principles underlying the way health information services and resources are organized and managed, with chapters on identifying users' needs, training users, and marketing and evaluating services. Part three depicts the skills needed to make effective use of the knowledgebase, including skills in formulating the question, selecting appropriate sources, searching databases and the Internet, filtering, evaluating, and keeping up to date with the knowledgebase as well as organizing a personal knowledgebase. The importance of evidence-based medicine to health care as well as to information service providers is a recurrent theme. Quoting a United States survey in which the National Library of Medicine found that clients prefer to perform their own searches, Managing Knowledge in Health Services promotes the importance of training users. According to the Nottingham study, “while end-user searching is inelegant, it is not necessarily ineffective” (page 157). Managing Knowledge in Health Services provides a brief guide to the design of a training program, including examples of evaluative studies and a table that provides the benefits and drawbacks of different methods of teaching. Recognizing the difficulty health professionals have in attending training sessions during office hours, Managing Knowledge in Health Services reports on several instances of Web-based training. The authors also recognize the need for information professionals to enhance skills in training, critical appraisal, and evidence-based techniques, providing Websites of ongoing projects that provide such material. Chapter seventeen thoroughly covers searching essentials, comparing free-text searching with thesaurus use and expounding upon citation searching and use of Boolean operators. Database and search term selection as well as strategies to rectify searches that retrieve too many or too few hits are discussed. Chapter eighteen provides a fairly extensive discussion of medical, general, and meta search engines, emphasizing librarians' roles in posting bookmarks to intranets and using Web pages to market the library. Chapter sixteen provides examples of information protocols and cites studies that classify information needs. In discussing the identification of clients' information needs, the authors pinpoint factors that are often ignored: those that are unexpressed as well as those of nonusers. They list questions to ask when developing surveys, interviews, and questionnaires and suggest strategies to increase response rates. Consumer health information, identification and organization of information resources, and marketing are also covered. Managing Knowledge in Health Services provides insight into the manner in which colleagues in the United Kingdom deal with universal challenges to information service providers. This timely publication will be of value to information practitioners in all health care settings, as well as to students.

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