BackgroundAlready well situated in the community, paramedics work collaboratively with other community partners to ensure patients receive the services that they require and the high quality in-home and in-community care they deserve. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the prevalence of social inequities in Canada, particularly in already marginalized groups, and the importance of social connectedness and caregiver wellbeing solutions. We sought to explore innovations in community paramedicine programs across Canada in response to COVID-19.MethodsWe conducted a scoping literature review of community paramedicine publications since 2020, with a focus on Canadian context, and undertook semi-structured interviews with key informants to capture innovations that may not be well represented in the literature.ResultsA total of 22 studies, combined with 26 grey literature sources were identified through the literature search. We interviewed ten stakeholders from diverse community care and community paramedicine settings across Canada to further explore each element of the conceptual framework. A conceptual framework (Figure 1) was developed to categorize the literature and findings into themes, namely: leveraging technology (e.g., virtual consultations, remote monitoring); responding to COVID-19 (e.g., mass testing and vaccination); addressing social needs (e.g., home visits, helping patients with groceries); caring for vulnerable populations (e.g., providing palliative care at home). These innovations were united in the idea of collaborating with other health care professionals and agencies, while facilitating care and case management coordination.ConclusionsThe COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the essential collaborative care role community paramedicine programs can provide to patients in their homes or communities. Community paramedicine programs have evolved to meet the needs of their communities. These programs have demonstrated their ability to support public health measures, provide home and community-based care, and most importantly, collaborate with other health care professionals in coordinating and providing care to Canadians regardless of social circumstances.
Are you considering establishing a new or re-invigorated subject liaison program in your library but don't know how to begin? Why not partner with an established liaison program at another library? Throughout the spring and fall of 2015, key public service managers at Louisiana State University (LSU) Libraries visited six Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) to see, among other things, successful liaison programs. The LSU librarians were particularly impressed with the University of Central Florida (UCF) Libraries' three-year-old reimagined subject librarian program. Following this visit, LSU managers began reworking their program by fine-tuning liaisons' program assignments and creating a liaison training program that focused on academic program profiling, faculty profiling, curriculum mapping, curriculum integrated instruction, increased liaison visibility and accessibility, and proactive outreach to faculty and students. In this article, public service heads from UCF and LSU discuss how their liaison programs are the same and how they differ, how librarians collaborated in finding new ways of reaching faculty, what the challenges are in their current programs, and what the future may hold. Hopefully, lessons learned by UCF and LSU will provide insight for other academic libraries wishing to create liaison programs designed to support student and faculty success at their own institutions. (Please see http://guides.ucf.edu/ucflsu for graphics.
Hey Don! You have come a long way since you were Head of the Main Library at Charleston County Library. Please tell us about yourself. What have you been doing? DB: I joined the faculty of Belmont Abbey College (Belmont, N.C.) in 2000 as Director of Library Services. Previously, I had served as Head of the Information Commons and as Associate University Librarian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Before that, I had spent fifteen years in public library management positions, most recently as Regional Branch Head and then Head of Main Library with the Charleston County Public Library in Charleston, South Carolina. ATG: You have had a long and distinguished career. Where did you do your graduate work? And didn't you win an award or two if my memory serves me right? DB: I did graduate work at the University of Michigan where I won the Hopwood Writing Award (1977). A few years later I was also the first recipient of NCLA's Doralyn J. Hickey Award for my first article about library technology. ("Decision Points in Small-Scale Automation." North Carolina Libraries, 44(3) Fall 1986. 159-169). ATG: And of course your articles include "Conceptualizing an Information Commons" (Journal of Academic Librarianship. 25(2) March 1999. 82-89.) which Paul Conway, formerly with Duke University and now with the University of Michigan, has called "...the seminal article that defined the core requirements of an Information Commons." Much of your writing has come from your role as head of the IC at UNC-Charlotte. Why did you move from a large university like UNCC to small Belmont Abbey College? And why should collection development, acquisitions and serials librarians be interested? DB: Well, in the digital era, for me at least, some of the cache has drained out of the large library mystique. Through FTE-based sliding scales and consortium licensing, small libraries can loom a good deal "larger" in the digital domain than they ever could in the realm of print collections. This 1950's era building I work in was sort of an ugly duckling to visiting colleagues, but I saw it differently. I realized that it could become a better environment for enabling student use of technology than for shelving a large print collection. Since we see a trend toward offsite storage, compact shelving, downsized in-house collections and so forth, I felt that this type of building had unrealized potential. I might add, when the Chronicle of Higher Education sent a reporter and an architect around the state to review historic
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