Healthcare librarians and the delivery of critical appraisal training: barriers to involvement

Abstract

Background: Many healthcare librarians are undertaking training in critical appraisal but a significant number are not cascading the training to their end-users. Objectives: To examine the barriers to healthcare librarian involvement in delivering critical appraisal training. Methods: A questionnaire survey of 57 library services across 48 NHS Trust Library Services in north west England followed up with 21 semi-structured interviews. Results: Two types of barriers were noted: extrinsic barriers (organisational, environmental, training, role expectations) and intrinsic barriers (knowledge, skills, attitude). Conclusions: These barriers are not mutually exclusive and by overcoming one of them it does not necessarily follow that healthcare librarians will engage in delivering critical appraisal skills training. The challenge lies in developing strategies to deal effectively with these barriers to encourage and support healthcare librarians in the delivery of critical appraisal training at a level at which they feel confident and able.

Building capacity among health care librarians to teach evidence-based practice—an evaluation

“…In addition to being inspiring, the opportunity to attend the Teaching EBM course clearly provided an important endorsement of the librarians' legitimacy as teachers of evidence-based practice and had a valuable impact on their confidence and willingness to get involved in teaching. Previous studies have similarly found that health care librarians lack confidence in teaching critical appraisal [2] or in their research knowledge [14] and in some cases may experience impostor syndrome in relation to their medical knowledge [15]. This evaluation reinforces the importance of the kind of specialist training enabled by the funding scheme in refreshing and boosting knowledge, skills, and confidence for the job of health care librarians, from which to build capability in teaching evidence-based practice.…”

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