Outreach Projects at the Hardin Library
Christopher Childs
Education & Outreach Librarian
Hardin Library for the Health Sciences
University of Iowa
Partnering for Patient Empowerment Through Community Awareness (PPECA)*
Partnering for Patient Empowerment Through Community Awareness (PPECA) a project that focuses on patient safety, is a collaborative effort between the Hardin Library, University of Iowa College of Public Health and its Institute for Quality Healthcare, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC), Consumers Advancing Patient Safety, and Zipperer Project Management which specializes in patient safety information projects. A three hour long train-the-trainer presentation is given that is broken up into several different modules. I teach the third module called Prepared with Information: The role of information in the safety of care. I’ll talk about the importance of getting the patient to become a more active participant in the healthcare process, tips on how this may be accomplished, and I’ll demonstrate some useful resources such as MedlinePlus and Iowa Go Local. While the location for these presentations has always been in a hospital setting, our audience usually always includes members of the local community. We always invite a public librarian from the area to join us and include a handout on consumer heath/patient safety information that hospital staff and community members can use to create their own program.
For more information on PPECA, please visit our website at http://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/ppeca/about.htm
Critical Access Hospitals
This project began by a request from the Director of Patient Care Services at Marengo Memorial Hospital, which is one of nine UI Critical Access Hospitals (CAH). She wanted allow her staff access to Hardin’s resources even though they aren’t affiliated with the University of Iowa. Our director, Linda Walton agreed to allow staff members access to Lonesome Doc for free to staff at Marengo and the other nine CAHs and offered to create a subject guide that would provide links to databases from the State Library that are free to everyone. I created a subject guide for everyone to reference and asked Pam Rees from the State Library of Iowa to join me for a phone conference to all ten hospitals. We went over the guide and our ILL policies and offered to visit each hospital to give a more detailed presentation. So far, Pam and I have visited seven hospitals. I give a brief overview of the CAH subject guide and then talk about access electronic text in PubMed and using Lonesome Doc as well as MedlinePlus and Iowa Go Local. Pam will then demonstrate several of the State Library’s databases such as EBSCOhost, CINHAL, and Consumer Health Complete. The response has been extremely positive and we are hoping to visit the remaining three hospitals in the next few months. After that, we will follow up with all ten hospital via another phone conference.
If you are interested in looking over the Critical Access Hospital Subject Guide, you can find it at http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/content.php?hs=a&pid=9109
*This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3503 with the University of Illinois at Chicago.
