The Medical Library Association Guide to Providing Consumer and Patient Health Information

摘要

It is evident from the first chapter that the writers of The Medical Library Association Guide to Providing Consumer and Patient Health Information have put together a valuable and comprehensive resource, one that steers their fellow librarians through the process of starting and maintaining a consumer health resource collection. Its thirteen chapters are full of sound advice and valuable guidance from beginning to end.The first chapter on the history of consumer and patient health librarianship by Michele Spatz immediately makes the point that the rise in availability of consumer health information is “intertwined in the history of medicine itself” (p. 1). Medicinal knowledge was for a long time the secret provenance of physicians. Only recently was medicine translated into language that the average person could understand. As patients and consumers became more involved in making their own decisions, the need for more and more information that they could understand grew as well. Patient-centered care spawned the need for patient health information.