Librarians' Forum

SkillShare

Thank you Donna for initiating and shaping SkillShare! SkillShare was a new concept to me, different from cross-training. While there was no presumption of filling in for each other, there was great value in getting outside the box of Grad Library oversight to observe how another professional-school library is being transformed from within.

There are at least three areas where Heath Sciences and Social Work share common values that are not shared between the Grad and Social Work Libraries: Outreach, Evidence-based Practice, and NIH grants:

Outreach:
I was amazed at how proactive the HSL are with community outreach. I saw Merle and Anna in action in two outreach activities:
• Merle had a poster session at a recent diabetes conference and advocated for open access to all NIH funded research within one year of publication.
• Anna distributed consumer health information at Visions, a vendor fair for the blind at Washtenaw Community College.

I also learned that there is an infrastructure to help support outreach in medicine. It’s called the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and it's dedicated to making the world's biomedical information available throughout the U.S. Taubman has a Consumer Health Reference Desk accessible by phone or email. This service and ILL of member libraries are promoted on The National Network of Libraries of Medicine web site. HSL are also adding an Outreach Librarian to their staff. It appears that the Health Sciences Libraries are in the process of reforming the university from a neighborhood bystander to a responsible, engaged citizen.

It seems to me that a community outreach partnership between the HSL and the SWL could
help the SWL operationalize the values it shares with medicine. For example, bill boards along I-94 and US 23 promote the School of Social Work as “preparing for an aging society”. I'd like to propose to the SWL staff that we attend senior community events to help the HSL distribute appropriate authoritative literature. As a subject specialist in gerontology, I know that there are many of us outside the medical field who have subject expertise to offer their outreach program.

EBP:
Not only are the HSL ahead of us in community outreach, they are also ahead of us in developing a comprehensive information skills curriculum of Evidence-based practice. Working as a team, the librarians developed teaching objectives and outlines for eight modules, while the Graduate Medical Education Office helped to refine them. Use of the modules is being monitored and assessment tools are currently in development. Presently Doreen and Preet are working with the Dept. of Medical Education in the development of instruments in the evaluation of residents' information competency.

In an article published in Research on Social Work Practice last fall our Dean, Paula Allen-Meares, Associate Dean for Educational Programs, Mary Ruffolo, and professor Matt Howard recommended among other things that
"Schools of Social Work provide continuing education courses that promote scientifically supported practices and that include a course devoted specifically to teaching the methods of EBP per se;
provide extensive training in computerized bibliographic database searching and other information acquisition methods;
employ measures to ensure student-practitioner competency in EBP methods prior to graduation;
emphasize specialty practice education to an unprecedented degree;
and test for competence in specialty practice areas.

So while the school and I are in agreement philosophically, we have a long way to go. Through our Curriculum Committee we have integrated Orientation, Community Needs Assessment and Policy Research into the curriculum, but we have not yet integrated EBP across the curriculum. I have proposed that just as the SSW requires that incoming students pass the Social Work version of SearchPath, http://www.lib.umich.edu/socwork/orientation/searchpath/
it also needs to require passing a test in EBP. This must go through an arduous Curriculum Committee and Governance approval process. I have three modules now available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/socwork/orientation/msw.html
that would serve for instruction of incoming students and help us integrate these concepts across the curriculum, if approved.

NIH Grants:
Our respective professional schools receive NIH funded grants. At a Grant Writing Workshop, Christine Black from the School of Nursing said that NIH doesn’t care about research, it cares about the health of the American people. That’s what I see in the outreach Anna and Merle are doing now.

It might be surprising that the School of Social
Work gets many NIH grants:

Community intervention strategies to reduce the risk of obesity and diabetes

Urban African-American Aging

African-American Mental Health Research

OBGYN Health Disparities

Dynamic Socioeconomic Disadvantages: Effects on Children

Functional Neuroanatomy of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Promoting Healthy Lifestyles among Women

Interventions for Irritable Babies with Depressed Mothers

Oral Health Disparities

Social Inequality Mind and Body

End violence in Asian/Asian American communities

And that the HSL gets NIH grants that reflect their strong commitment to consumer health:

Conduit to Health Information for Persons with Disabilities

Creating a Road Map: Local Public Health 2.0

Michigan Health Literacy Awareness,

Especially in the area of "Longitudinal patient cases" medicine resembles Social Work. Medical Students learn not only about clinical aspects of diseases, but also about social, family, economic, and psychological issues surrounding patients and their families, similar to SW students.

Conclusion: I hope the SWL can partner with the HSL where our practice areas overlap, especially with aging and chronically ill and disabled populations. I look to the Health Science Librarians for leadership in getting SW faculty to approve Evidence-based practice competencies across the curriculum. This discovery of commonality through SkillShare seriously makes me wonder why the SWL is not part of the Health Sciences Libraries.

Sally Haines
Public Services Librarian
Social Work Library