‘Personalised evidence’ for personalised healthcare: integration of a clinical librarian into mental health services – a feasibility study

Abstract

Aims and method To evaluate the feasibility of integrating a clinical librarian (CL) within four mental health teams. A CL was attached to three clinical teams and the Trustwide Psychology Research and Clinical Governance Structure for 12 months. Requests for evidence syntheses were recorded. The perceived impact of individual evidence summaries on staff activities was evaluated using a brief online questionnaire.Results Overall, 82 requests for evidence summaries were received: 50% related to evidence for individual patient care, 23% to generic clinical issues and 27% were on management/corporate topics. In the questionnaires 105 participants indicated that the most common impact on their practice was advice given to colleagues (51 respondents), closely followed by the evidence summaries stimulating new ideas for patient care or treatment (50 respondents).Clinical implications The integration of a CL into clinical and corporate teams is feasible and perceived as having an impact on staff activities. A CL may be able to collate ‘personalised evidence’ which may enhance individualised healthcare. In some cases the usual concept of a hierarchy of evidence may not easily apply, with case reports providing guidance which may be more applicable than population-based studies.

Information Literacy, Mental Health, and Lifelong Learning: Librarians and Health Care Professionals in Academic, Clinical, and Hospital Settings

“…For health care professionals seeking expertise in their field, proven information-seeking abilities such as database searching, article evaluation, and research application are often taught in the classroom by academic librarians but honed most effectively where their professionalism can be assessed via patient outcomes (20,21,(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). Sheer recall (or transfer) of information literacy skill sets from undergraduate and graduate years of study can be eclipsed by knowledge acquired through other continuing medical education opportunities such as journal clubs, conference attendance, professional programs, or specialized certification (12,22).…”

Modeling the invention of a new inference rule: The case of ‘Randomized Clinical Trial’ as an argument scheme for medical science

“…As should be clear from Figure 7 (and from [15]), the positioning at the top of the pyramid may be contested. Increasingly, both researchers and scientists regard systematic reviews as preferable to even the most rigorously conducted individual studies, and for good reason.…”

“…In health sciences, these and many other methods are available, and the confidence to be placed in each is discussed quite explicitly, often being represented as an evidence hierarchy that shows preference relationships among different ways of answering questions in medical science. These preference relationships are themselves contentious matters [8,15], so the establishment of preference schemes for sets of inference rules is also of interest.…”

“…But both individual circumstances and future innovations may result in challenges to what currently appears at the top of the pyramid. Figure 7 gives preference to "NICE guidelines" (clinical practice guidelines from the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), based on the argument [15] that some purposes are better served by qualifying conclusions drawn from systematic review with other sources of guidance.…”

“…7. An example of an evidence hierarchy in medicine, from [15]. every individual study is open to possible rebuttal on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the whole body of evidence reviewed.…”