Medical Librarianship and Information Science in Evidence-Based Medicine Arena

摘要

The complexity and time limits involved in care delivery, seeking out the valid information at the right time is an increasingly different purpose for many health practitioners to reach. In recent years, Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) introduced as a solution to remove these challenges and as a new paradigm to standard health-care. EBM is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. Along with the individual clinical expertise, it is a required core skill for clinical problem solving. Again, the gap between medical information areas with clinical services domain, is the main challenge in EBM. Such gap, besides medical changing environment has provided new opportunity for health sciences librarian that EBM counted as one of these opportunities. A review of the literature shows the role of the librarian in this enterprise is not new, but rather a continually evolving process. Participation of librarian in EBM is rooted in past practices, most notably in clinical medical librarianship. EBM extends the librarians’ role beyond recognition of the literature to involvement in practicing and teaching quality filtering and critical appraisal of the literature. Indeed, health science librarian is a key of enhanced access to scientific evidence in medical literature. This role is executed through librarian professional abilities. In this review, we described initially EBM and its principles, and then we mentioned librarians’ abilities that are required for their growing involvement in EBM. Finally, we notified the necessity of health-care managers’ attention to the role of librarian in EBM arena.