Clinical Research and Patient Wellness Training Session in Sioux City, Iowa

Posted by hspielbauer on August 1st, 2017 Posted in: Outreach
Tags: Success Stories

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On July 12, Chris Childs the Education & Outreach Librarian for the University of Iowa’s Hardin Library for the Health Sciences gave a Clinical Research & Patient Wellness Training Session to seventeen staff members of the Siouxland Medical Education Foundation. The purpose of this training session is to introduce the audience to free high quality clinical, evidence-based practice and patient wellness resources that they can access either from the Internet of the State Library of Iowa after they sign up for a State Library Card.  All of these resources are listed on the Free Clinical Research & Patient Wellness Resources LibGuide.  The LibGuide’s URL is http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/crpw

Chris has been giving this training session for several years to different groups throughout the state of Iowa that are not affiliated with the University of Iowa. During the training session, audience members learn how to use Boolean logic and truncation to search PubMed and CINAHL, how to use the filters in PubMed and CINHAL to find free full text articles, the evidence-based practice pyramid and the importance of locating systematic reviews, open access journals, patient education resources from the National Library of Medicine and mobile apps and websites that can be downloaded for free.  Chris has given this training session at hospitals, rural clinics, public libraries and the Newton County Correctional Facility.

Recently, the State Library of Iowa decided not to renew its subscription to CINHAL and other EBSCOhost databases. This news hit Chris pretty hard as most of his training session are to nurses who greatly value CINAHL and appreciate the fact that they could access the State Library of Iowa’s subscription for free just by getting a State Library Card.  After making edits to the Free Clinical Research & Patient Wellness Resources LibGuide to reflect these changes, he decided to make a positive out of a negative and take the time that he would normally use to go over basic searching in CINAHL to go over subject searching techniques in PubMed and the MeSH database.  He would have tried this new version of this training session out in Sioux City, but he was only given 45 minutes instead of the usual hour, so he didn’t have the opportunity.

The map below shows all of the outreach and exhibiting activities Chris has done throughtout Iowa since 2008.