A Day in an NHS Library

With thanks to my Chartership mentor, Clare Edwards and Susan Prosser and the team at Singleton Staff Library for putting up with me; http://www.sblibraryservices.wales.nhs.uk/home

When I set out on CILIP Chartership, I was determined to look outside of the sector I work in – I’ve never worked in any other setting but Higher Education libraries. This informed my determination to have a mentor outside of HE, and I was lucky enough to get one working in NHS England, who facilitated a day for me to shadow an NHS library in Wales which happens to be 5 minutes from my office – the hospital is across campus and convenient as we have a medical school.

Like many people, before I started working in the sector I had no idea that the NHS would even have libraries or librarians, so with this post I’m going to go through my day with them

First thing I noticed: WARMTH. The whole library was warm! I am used to wearing 2 jumpers, needing a portable heater, and wrapping a scarf around myself like the Granny from Red Riding hood. This was bliss, especially as I had just come down with Freshers Flu (bloody students!)

After a swift tour – the usual shelving, PCs networked to the NHS or the university, quiet study spaces, we sat down and had a chat about the differences of the work environment. The most notable difference for me was staffing levels, there are so many people working in a variety of roles in the library that 8 months in I could probably name about 35% of them, whereas the team in the NHS Library consisted of 5 staff members who cover all aspects of running the library service. Another main difference was the user base and registration, where university students are automatically enrolled as library members, registering in the NHS library is a proactive process – 5 medical students registered while I was visiting.

There is also a notable difference in management which is intrinsically linked to staffing levels and being part of a wider organisation. Changes to services or resources in a university library take a long time to agree on and put into effect and practice and often rely on buy-in and permission from above and clear communication to a large body of staff, whereas the NHS library was able to implement and communicate changes at a relatively swift pace without too much reference to external players. However, you could argue that a university library has to ensure that its resources and training provision needs to work for a more diverse range of subjects and disciplines, compared to the more focused needs of health library users.

A training session on Literature Searching had been arranged for that morning so I sat in as I was interested to see how transferable literature searching from HE to NHS would be. In HE, we teach students how to carry out literature searches and they are expected to do it themselves for their assignments, whereas NHS libraries carry out literature searches on behalf of the hospital staff, although there is a grey area around Medical students who should be carrying out their own searches for assignments. During the session, I got to do some practical work and respond to a literature search query which I actually quite enjoy, while getting more familiar with the additional complexities that come with searching medical databases including various terms, subject headings and the need to fulfil very specific criteria and relational terms – e.g Illness X + Specific Age group + Treatment from X year to Y year.

Lunch. SO MUCH CHEAPER THAN UNI CATERING. Also it was a Friday, and I am glad to see that all institutions across Britain seem to have stuck with the tradition that stretches back to school days of Friday = Fish n Chips.

After lunch we went through some of the service specifics including access and resource sharing across the other libraries in the Health Board, and the benefits of the shared library management system (LMS) across Wales. The shared LMS led to a discussion on coordination across other health libraries, where HE libraries connect and share practice via WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum), and CILIP Wales to an extent, there is no equivalent of WHELF for Health libraries.

On reflection, I really enjoyed shadowing for the day and not purely because of the revelation of a warm library, I responded to the responsive nature of the service provided, answering queries and initiating searches on a time limited basis, and the consistency of demand compared to the semester-dependent workload of working in HE, as well as the autonomy of the team. It has been a really valuable experience rather than just a box ticking exercise to contribute to a Chartership assessment criteria.