Involving Clinical Librarians in Clinical Settings: Skills, Roles, Advantages and Barriers

ABSTRACT

Medical team members require information in order to improve the quality of patient treatment. The large volume of information and limited time of medical teams necessitates the involvement of clinical librarians in order to provide up to date and evidence-based information. The goal of this study is to identify the necessary skills required of a clinical librarian in order to work with medical teams; to define their roles and duties, and to detail advantages and possible barriers of clinical librarian involvement on medical teams based on literature review. A search for related articles was carried out in 2017 using keywords including: clinical librarian, hospital librarian, medical librarian and health sciences librarian in Noormags, SID, MagIran, Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed databases. After reviewing articles in English and Persian, a total of 46 were selected for further analysis. The findings showed that the skills required of clinical librarians on medical teams can be divided into three main categories: general skills, medicine-related skills, and professional librarianship skills. The duties of clinical librarians were also divided into two groups; medical information services and evidence-based medicine services. The involvement of clinical librarians on medical teams can create advantages for patients, medical teams, clinical librarians as well as for education and research. However, this involvement suffers from barriers due to inadequate librarian’s skills, insufficient human resources, lack of organizational support, the attitude of medical teams, lack of understanding from the healthcare sector and lack of proper infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical environment
• clinical informationist
• clinical librarian
• medical team

Financial support and sponsorship

This article was extracted from Master’s thesis by Elaheh Zare-Farashbandi, research plan 396,008, approved by Vice‑Chancellery for Research and Technology of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.