Partners for Patients: Hospital, Medical & Public Librarians— Health Care Allies

摘要

The late Andrew Herxheimer, a clinical pharmacologist with the UK London Cochrane Center, penned an editorial in 2012 to mobilize the health care and adjacent communities to directly address the information and decisionmaking needs of patients and families. He called for all health care workers, public and hospital librarians, along with public schools to develop targeted educational programs. Clearly, consumer/patient targeted programs that explain and frame crucial information on medications, what patients need to know and ask before and during drug treatment, invite public-hospital library collaboration projects (16). The mission of both hospital and public librarians address teaching, informing, and empowering users to effectively use Web sites, Webinars, online tutorials, in person workshops, and sometimes one-on-one teaching. This is the public and hospital librarians' vocation: providing high touch to the high tech world of health care. Hospital and public librarians are the perfect partners to instill users with a set of skills to assess health information validity, legitimacy, and accuracy. The both share similar challenges: funding, staffing, space, and the ever-present questions about their continuing existence in the era of Amazon and Google. Partnering can maximize results for both libraries, as well as helping increase patients' abilities to ask clinicians informed questions and actively participate in their own health care decision making. One possible positive strategy worthy of exploration is public and hospital librarians partnering with their hospitals, public health systems, health care organizations, and health care payers. This sort of partnership trifecta might just show greater health outcomes for patients, better satisfaction scores for hospitals, and dare it be mentioned, fewer malpractice payments, as well as increased library use, virtual or physical, along with improved satisfaction for librarians' roles in both hospital and public library settings.