For the sixth article in the series, we’re going to look at the last two barriers identified in the MLA’s publication, which are awareness and resource scope.¹ According to MLA these refer to, firstly, the awareness of tools available to help doctors access clinical information. Secondly, the understanding of which tools to use and when. Given that at most institutions these barriers fall within the remit of medical librarians, we thought who better to ask than them.
The responses were interesting, overall it’s clear that librarians want to tackle these barriers and certainly agree they exist. However, many suggest they are limited in what they feel they can do. From technical and policy restrictions, like being unable to edit their websites, to time and staffing restrictions. Some even suggested that the issues are simply too complex.
The situation is certainly frustrating and both parties appear to be losing out. Doctors want more time with patients and less time doing admin.² There are tools available to help them achieve this, but they aren’t aware of them or don’t know how to use them. Librarians are frustrated at this but feel powerless to affect change.
A common example is article requests. Medical librarians spend a lot of their time actioning paper requests that are often very easy to find and access through a tool like QxMD. “We often have these articles, and they could have got what they wanted themselves, but they don’t know how. Others can use certain tools to find what they want, but struggle with how to use them a different way” — Kirsten Burkitt
This is frustrating for us at QxMD too, we know we have the answer but it’s not always reaching the audience that could benefit from it.
However, there are effective solutions. We spoke to Kirsten Burkitt, Manager of Library and Electronic Services at Royal Australasian College of Surgeons about some of the things they are implementing and what QxMD can do to help:
- Integrated request forms: “We are working on new request forms so that our users will be directed to an article if we have it, and a new back end that offers users the ability to see the progress of their request”
- ‘How to’ videos: “We want to create very brief videos to show people the options so they can access resources themselves.” The video format seems to be popular and a number of institutions have mentioned this. To help, QxMD is working on simple instructional videos that institutions can personalize or drop into their own videos.
- Read by QxMD: “We recommend Read a lot, and those that use it find it great. It pushes out relevant content to the user and if they don’t like what they get, they can change their keywords, authors or journals to better suit their needs. But many are reluctant to take the plunge”
The last bullet is a challenge we’re focusing on, with help from users and librarians like Kirsten. We’ve made the institutional sign-on process as easy as possible. Working hard behind the scenes to integrate subscriptions and logins with partners like EZproxy, Shibboleth and OpenAthens. We’re now working on improving our instructional resources, like the videos mentioned above, to ensure as many people as possible benefit from our offerings.
This brings us to the conclusion of the series. We can say with confidence that the barriers identified by MLA are valid. Given the ever-increasing quantity of literature³ and time pressure on medical professionals⁴, it’s as challenging as ever to keep on top of medical literature. However, we are proud to say that QxMD provides a possible solution for the majority of the barriers, as we’ve evidenced throughout the series. We acknowledge that in regards to tool awareness and scope, there is work to do, and we accept that for now, integration into the patient encounter is beyond the scope of QxMD. However, the series has sparked lots of exciting discussions with users and some very interesting ideas. Watch this space.
MLA (Medical library association)
References:
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/33424474/
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/34160608/
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/32904414/
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/34160608/
