Small Projects Report: Health Information for Patients and Families
The Library of the Health Sciences at Princeton HealthCare System received a Small Project Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region in October 2008 for the purpose of purchasing “Health Information for Patients and Families” posters and placing them in strategic areas of our service area.
Our Library Committee felt that the library had much to offer and that we should reach out more to the community, the patients and their families and make them more aware of our services. We decided that we would hang the posters in both English and Spanish in strategic areas of all our hospital units, our outpatient clinics and patient/family waiting rooms. We hoped that we would give out patients and their families the assistance they might need in finding relevant information either through library resources or by sending them to MEDLINE Plus as well as other legitimate health sources. The librarian would be available for mediated searches and document delivery and library resources would be at their disposal. The signs also direct people to our library website where we have links to MEDLINE Plus as well as other patient education sites. We also have a MEDLINE Plus slide presentation on the library resources page as well as a tutorial from NLM on evaluating health information sites.
We produced the posters with the help of our outside printer and had the posters translated into Spanish since most of our clinic attendees are Spanish speaking and in keeping with all other posted signs in our institution, we had them framed.
Gradually, we have seen an increase of requests from patients and their families and we have been able to assist them. We can only measure direct requests or visits. There is no way to note how many times the web site has been used for our resources because of the posters. The project is ongoing and we feel that, with the funds from the grant, we have done a great service to our patients and their families by making sure they know where to come for the information they need.
Louise Yorke- Princeton HealthCare System- Princeton, NJ
