Objective

Health authority and hospital library services have long supported clinicians with evidence-informed decision-making and patient care decisions. In healthcare organizations this most often comes in the form of literature searching. In the past, hospital libraries often focused on physicians at a local acute site or small regional area, while different staff may have relied on library services provided by their professional associations. With the evolution of full-service regional library teams serving patrons across the entire continuum of care, increased movement toward online services and point of care tools, coupled with changes in healthcare staff makeup, has the primary clientele for library’s literature search service changed?

Methods

For ten years, library staff within our large regional health authority have systematically recorded information about patrons requesting literature searches. This includes job title, department, and category (frontline clinicians, physicians/surgeons/psychiatrists, educators/leaders, management/operations and corporate level). By collating and summarizing entries of user categories each year, we seek to identify annual trends and determine if there have been any significant changes in patron categories over a ten-year period.

Results

In progress

Conclusion

By analyzing this data, we aim to answer some of the following questions: have literature search requestors’ job categories changed over ten years? Is there a clear trend? Is it worthwhile to collect this data, and does it provide valuable information, given the time and processes required? By reviewing these findings we hope to use the results to inform the library’s service planning, marketing, outreach, training, and collections.