Expanding Partnerships
Cathy Eames, MA, MSLS, AHIP
Children’s Hospital of Michigan
Detroit, MI 48201
Children’s Hospital of Michigan celebrated the American Nurses Credentialing Center award of Magnet designation this year. During the lengthy preparation process nurses at CHM increased their focus on developing an evidence based practice climate throughout the hospital.
As a result, library presentations are now included at new nurses’ orientations, unit practice council meetings, and the librarian participated on the Evidence Based Practice Committee. This year the CHM Department of Nursing sponsored a one day conference for nurses called “Promoting Excellence Through Evidence Based Practice: Enhancing Pediatric Bedside Care.” Librarian, Misa Mi, was invited to present two sessions on “Finding the Evidence” and thanks to a NN/LM GMR Exhibit Award a booth promoting PubMed, MedlinePlus and other NLM services was included in the vendor area.
The concurrent sessions and the exhibit were wonderful opportunities to promote library services and the NLM databases and products. It is always a surprise to find out how many people have not heard about
MedlinePlus because it is used so often by librarians. Conference attendees picked up brochures and were particularly interested in demonstrations of the MedlinePlus Multiple Languages information.
Staffing the NLM exhibit provided the opportunity to talk with nurses and the short demonstrations generated 5 requests for literature searches from nurses who had not used the library in the past. Both the
concurrent sessions and staffing the exhibit provided an opportunity to expand the partnership with nursing and improve awareness of health information resources for health professionals.
This project was 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.
