Patients' libraries: An exploratory study of cases in selected large voluntary teaching hospitals in the northeastern United States.

摘要

The study centered on libraries for patients in general hospitals. A preliminary survey of the target population--large voluntary general teaching hospitals in the northeastern United States--found a wide variety of conditions existing, from large, well-organized libraries with diverse collections and regularly provided services to simple book cart services, irregularly and infrequently provided.;Based on data from the survey, four patients' libraries with optimal collections and services were chosen for in-depth investigation. Besides exploring their natures and their roles within the institutions, the research examined the effect that certain factors may have had on their viabilities. The factors included: a tradition of existence; financial support from the parent institutions; strong oral statements of commitment by the parent hospitals and by selected physicians and health care professionals based there; the provision of staff and materials from local community libraries; and, finally, the availability of externally provided supplementary resources. To illuminate the data resulting from the investigation, four hospitals in the target population without patients' libraries were studied to determine why a patients' library did not exist.;The study found that while the four patients' libraries traditionally enjoyed the fiscal and moral support of their parent institutions, in recent years, three had been adversely affected by the parent institution's fiscal constraints. In those cases, a hospital tradition of providing library materials to patients was more closely associated with the library's current viability than any other factor examined. In the one case where parent hospital fiscal constraints were less severe, the library's viability was more closely tied to the parent hospital's consideration of the library's value to patients.;A parallel investigation of the hospitals without patients' libraries found that the one factor that was most consistently associated with the absence of patients' libraries was no tradition of providing such a resource. The next most closely associated factor was location of the hospital in a region where the local public library made no attempts to identify and meet the library-related needs of hospitalized people.