Background: UBC is the only academic institution in British Columbia that provides accredited master's degrees for rehabilitation professionals in Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Audiology and Speech Sciences. British Columbia is struggling with a shortage of rehabilitation professionals, leading to the expansion of UBC’s rehabilitation programs to satellite sites in Surrey, Prince George, and Victoria (Health Sciences Association of British Columbia, 2021).

Case Presentation: UBC Library has adopted a distributed model of librarianship to match this distributed education model. The model was developed by librarians who support UBC’s distributed Undergraduate Medicine program, but it has only been adopted by rehabilitation sciences within the last five years. In practice, our model consists of one coordinating librarian who supports the Vancouver cohort of each program and oversees the coordination of teaching, collections, and resource development for the entire program. Each distributed site has its own on-site librarian who supports their cohort as one part of their multi-faceted roles.

Conclusions: This presentation will describe our model of library support for UBC’s continually developing rehabilitation programs. We will outline the benefits of the model, including improving the learning experience for students through onsite teaching, reducing the burden of keeping up with program expansions, and bringing multiple perspectives into our work. We will also discuss challenges that we have faced, such as coordination with instructors at multiple sites and technical issues with hybrid teaching. Though this model is not without its challenges, it is nevertheless a novel way to ensure that all students in these distributed programs have equitable access to library support.

Reference:

Health Sciences Association of British Columbia. (2021, October). ‘We’re chronically understaffed’: A report on public rehabilitative healthcare in BC. https://hsabc.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/hsa-chronically-understaffed-exec-summary-for-web.pdf