Introduction to the NWAS Library Impact Study

NWAS Library & Knowldge Service Impact Study - Introduction

Hello, my name is Matt Holland and I am the Outreach Librarian for the North West Ambulance Service.

Today I want to introduce you to the NWAS Library and Knowledge Service Impact Study.

First of all what is an Impact Study?

An Impact Study aims to gather evidence from you, library users, that the service the Library provides changes for the better the way you do things and ultimately positively effects patient care.

This is actually a big claim for any library service to make so it’s worth just expanding on how that might happen.

Let us say that you are looking into a procedure or practice. You might contact the Library and ask for a search to be done to find the latest research on the topic published in peer reviewed journals.

Having reviewed the search you could then ask for the full text of relevant papers.

You might also ask the Librarian to look for clinical summaries, existing guidelines, reports and case studies as well.

At the end of the process you should be reasonable sure you have access to all of the best and most recent evidence on your topic.

The question of Impact is this?

If you hadn’t contacted the Library and received the help that you did, would the outcome be as good? If the answer is NO then the Library service has had an Impact.

I hope you get the idea. To try and capture some of this evidence there are two questionnaires on the Library website [ http://www.networks.nhs.uk/nhs-networks/nwas-library-and-information-service ].

Look under Guides and then NWAS LIS Impact Study. The first questionnaire is an 5 question survey for anyone to complete.

The Second is a very short mini case study, for anyone who can think of a specific instance when using the Library has helped.

In the next few months the Library will use your evidence to produce an Impact Study which will be made freely available on the Library website, and updated every year with new examples.

I understand that completing questionnaires is time consuming, however, I can assure you that any contribution you make is appreciated.

Thank you.

Matt Holland Librarian Updated June 2016 Matt.Holland@nwas.nhs.uk #LibrariesNhsImpactStudy