Patient Education Services, Scholarly Trends, and Research Services

Today I attended and presented at the contributed papers session 1-A. This session had presentations about patient education services, scholarly trends, and research services. I felt that I was in great company with wonderful authors from various institutions.

The first paper was titled The Art of Information: Designing and Delivering a Multimedia Education Initiative for Older Adults on Urinary Incontinence. Although this paper specifically covered the topic of urinary incontinence the methods used could be implemented for various topics. Collaboration that includes medical librarians is a key feature for programs such as this and will help ensure their success. Offering multiple ways to communicate and access information can help promote dialogue between patients and providers by increasing their awareness of medical issues.

The second paper, Using Learning Styles as a Proven Strategy for Patient Education, highlighted an aspect of patient education that I'd never thought of. When working with patients we, as librarians, are always told to think about reading levels; however, we rarely think about the way a person learns. The authors used randomized controlled trials to discover what type of learning style patients liked and found that multiple styles were preferred. It was concluded that understanding this and combining it with other aspects of health literacy would greatly benefit patients and aid the communication process.

I was a coauthor on the third paper, A Study on the Art of Information: Publishing and Presenting by Medical Librarians. We surveyed librarians across the nation to see how they preferred to disseminate information. We found that medical librarians equally prefer presenting and publishing, but like quantitative methodologies over other types. Being interested in conducting research stood out as the most influencing factor, while lack of time was the most inhibiting. We concluded that encouragement from others and embedding research into the workflow could get more medical librarians to publish or present their work.

The Art and Science of Assisting Researchers with NIH Public Access Compliance was the last paper in this session. Most of us have faculty or doctors (or nurses, PAs, and even ourselves) who conduct research and need to make sure that we comply with NIH policies. They discussed their process for handling this issue as well as challenges that they faced. The tough, but necessary, conclusion was that a class wouldn't work to get things done. Librarians needs to work one on one with researchers to ensure compliance because each case was different.

This was very informative session that contained relevant  information for medical librarians in both hospital and academic libraries. I wish I could have attended all paper sessions today and look forward to the papers and posters that will be presented tomorrow.