2014 Medical Librarians Month Contest Winner

Posted by Patricia Devine on November 14th, 2014 Posted in: Funding, News from Network Members, News From NNLM PNR

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We are happy to announce Kathy Fatkin as the winner of the 2014 Medical Librarians Month Contest! Kathy has won a $1500 travel scholarship to MLA 2015 in Austin, Texas. Thanks to all who entered and for telling us your story about how you have made a difference.  Additional entries will be posted over the next few days.

by Kathy J. Fatkin PhD, AHIP, RN
Medical Librarian, Researcher & Evidence-Based Practice Coordinator
Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center
Idaho Falls, ID

I am a solo librarian working at a community hospital and like other health sciences librarians I work to provide health information that will improve lives. In my position I serve on the hospital’s nursing research council (NRC) and as a group the NRC works on evidence-based nursing practice. We have performed multiple literature reviews with summaries of evidence to guide clinical nursing practice. This activity gave me practice reading and evaluating research articles. I realized I have the skills not only to find current evidence but I could add value to my library services by including summaries of evidence to save time for the clinical staff.

Our quality improvement team requests literature searches prior to scheduling a meeting to perform a root cause analysis (RCA) for any type of sentinel event (an unexpected occurrence that either results in death or serious disability) or “near misses” when something that threatens life or limb could have occurred. The nurse who coordinates these RCAs and I work together to determine a clinical question that we expect can be answered from the literature related to the event. I search multiple databases using key terms from the question and pull the available full text articles that match the inquiry and request interlibrary loans for articles that are of interest but are not available in our collection. I use a form I developed with the NRC for our summaries of the literature and pull out important information from the research article and identify what portions apply to our question. After reading the available evidence I summarize how the body of evidence answers the clinical question. I send my search, the full text articles, and the completed summary form to the quality nurse and I distribute copies of articles as requested by participants prior to the RCA meeting.

As Ranganathan expressed in one of his laws of library science, the library saves the time of the reader. I save the time of the entire RCA committee by gathering, evaluating, and citing the evidence. This allows them to concentrate on identifying improvements that need to be made to our systems to avoid this event in the future and improve the quality of care provided at our hospital to the patients we serve using current research based evidence.