Abstract
The research explored the roles of practicing clinical librarians embedded in a patient care team. Six clinical librarians from Canada and one from the United States were interviewed to elicit detailed descriptions of their clinical roles and responsibilities and the context in which these were performed. Participants were embedded in a wide range of clinical service areas, working with a diverse complement of health professionals. As clinical librarians, participants wore many hats, including expert searcher, teacher, content manager, and patient advocate. Unique aspects of how these roles played out included a sense of urgency surrounding searching activities, the broad dissemination of responses to clinical questions, and leverage of the roles of expert searcher, teacher, and content manager to advocate for patients. Detailed role descriptions of clinical librarians embedded in patient care teams suggest possible new practices for existing clinical librarians, provide direction for training new librarians working in patient care environments, and raise awareness of the clinical librarian specialty among current and budding health information professionals.
Highlights
Librarians have been supporting patient care teams in clinical settings for more than thirty years [1, 2], providing benefits to medicine such as saving clinicians’ time [3], decreasing costs [4], supporting decision making [5], and improving overall patient care [6]
Stanford University Lane Medical Library recently advertised a position in which the successful applicant would spend the majority of his or her workday embedded within a patient care team
clinical librarians (CLs) were defined as individuals with a library science degree who, in the context of a patient care team, provide customized services to meet information needs related to patient care
Summary
Librarians have been supporting patient care teams in clinical settings for more than thirty years [1, 2], providing benefits to medicine such as saving clinicians’ time [3], decreasing costs [4], supporting decision making [5], and improving overall patient care [6] These clinical librarians (CLs) have been cast in roles ranging from the ‘‘traditional’’ (such as performing literature searches and promoting library services) to less traditional, more embedded roles (such as attending case conferences and participating in patient care rounds) [1, 3, 7,8,9,10]. The CL would accompany physicians on daily patient care bedside rounds, provide information literacy training based on patient care questions, and attend team meetings
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