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Library Knowledge Services (North)

Mobilising Evidence and Knowledge to support informed decision making in Clinical Informatics

I work within the Clinical Governance team at NHS Digital. We recently organised the NHS Clinical Informatics Congress. In addition to providing management support to the event I was responsible for the exhibitor’s area, encouraging and assisting our clinicians to produce poster presentations to showcase their work at the congress. I was keen to lead by example and take the opportunity to present my own work and showcase how knowledge management is embedded in clinical informatics at NHS Digital.…

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Knowledge mobilisation and impact on Patient Care - Working like a dog: exploring the Role of Animal-Assisted Therapy.

‘Wag & Company’, a charity which provides animal assisted therapy to older people, was launched in May 2016. The Charity matches and enables professionally assessed volunteers and their dogs, known as ‘Visiting Wag Teams’, to safely offer one to two hour visits per week to older people in a variety of different settings across the North East region. The initiative to investigate the benefits of pet therapy at North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust first came from a ward based therapy team working on the elderly care unit to help patients with dementia. Information gathered from the wider literature revealed evidence to support the benefits of ‘Animal Assisted Therapy’ in helping to reduce anxiety, improve physical health, cognitive function and overall health and well-being.…

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Training Course Reflection: Supporting Researchers

The ‘Supporting Researchers’ course was organised and funded by Health Education England and run by Dr Maria Grant and Lisa Jeskins. The course ran over 4 weeks and there were several cohorts you could join. My cohort ran from 24th October – 15th November 2022. The first week we were asked to take part in a flipped classroom, which was followed-up in the second week by a webinar on Microsoft Teams. This format was repeated in weeks 3 and 4. The first part focused on taking stock of the things that our library service already does to support researchers, while the second part helped us to take a step back in order to work out how to pull our support offer into a coherent strategy, underpinned by SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound) objectives and aligned with our library’s and organisation’s strategies. There were plenty of opportunities for us to share ideas and to practise writing SMART objectives.…

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7 Things to do to Prepare Your Library for the New Library Management System

The preparation to move to a new library management system has begun in Bradford. We have started long task of organising and cleaning the library data exists on our current library management system (Heritage Cirqa) and prepare for the upcoming shift. As a library we came across 7 things which we think will help to consider should you need to clean, reformat, or delete any old data which has been left over the years before the switch in Library Management Systems.…

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Northumbria Book Club – New Developments

We launched our Book club in February 2019 to highlight the benefits of leisure reading for clinical staff and students and to promote the library to non-users. Every month, we choose a Book of the month (BOTM), which is displayed in our 4 libraries and recommended on social media. Our choices often tie in with topical events, for example, Women and power for International Women’s Day and Life on our planet for NHS Sustainability Day. We run a Facebook poll to choose a summer reading Book of the month and select a Christmas book for December – Twas the nightshift before Christmas is one of our most popular BOTMs so far.…

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Meeting face to face again … and managing a hybrid event

On 29th June 2022, Yorkshire and Humber Health Libraries Network (YOHHLNet) held its first face to face event for over two and a half years. The study day (held at Leeds Central Library) incorporated the AGM and brought around 30 people from across the region together. The event booked up really quickly, even before the agenda had been finalised, showing the keenness of many to meet face to face again.…

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Hello from Hannah Williams - new starter

I’ve recently joined the team at Leeds Community Healthcare Trust as a Library Trainee. My team have been so welcoming, and I feel very fortunate to be in a role where learning is constant and fully supported. I’ve managed to visit some of the other health libraries and their teams across Leeds in the last few weeks and look forward to meeting more in the future.…

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New Roles: New Horizons

I joined the team at North Cumbria Integrated Care in June 2021 as a Knowledge Support Officer. My previous experience as a Librarian was in schools where all teaching and learning was face to face in a pre-COVID world; suddenly the information landscape looked very different! In this new, virtual world enhancing my own digital skills in order to provide quality training and support was my immediate challenge. Research and networking being my top priority. New training tools and techniques proved to be an exciting opportunity for me and I was soon keen to share these new platforms and strategies with colleagues.…

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Chorley library open day June 21st 2022

With lockdown restrictions easing and needing to get people back into the library space after the pandemic the library at Chorley Hospital decided to have an open day where we could showcase our lovely library space and onsite resources as well as providing much needed air con on what was quite a hot day!…

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