Enhancing patient care: the power of librarian-mediated literature reviews

Our health system library fields thousands of requests for literature searches each year in support of research, policy, evidence-based practice projects, and care for individual patients. With fewer library staff than comparable institutions and an engaged, multidisciplinary clinical workforce, we face ongoing pressures to do more with less and to demonstrate our value.

A 2021 article in the Journal of Hospital Librarianship offered an existing survey and basic project design that we used to assess our impacts. We adapted, with permission, the survey and methods of "Analysis of a Hospital Librarian Mediated Literature Search Service at a Regional Health Service in Australia," a quality improvement project authored by Siemensma et al. (2021) [1]. Throughout 2023 we sent the adapted survey to all employees and affiliated clinicians who requested literature searches. The survey included five multiple choice questions as well as a free text box for comments. Respondents were asked to provide simple demographic information and consider the impact and quality of results they received from the librarian.

Our survey-based evaluation of our literature search service underscores the importance of librarian-mediated literature searches for clinical practice, policy development, and patient care. Demonstrating hospital library impacts is increasingly important and increasingly challenging for understaffed teams. Assessments using previously published surveys are feasible for non-academic libraries and serve as compelling cases for the continued and expanded integration of library resources into clinical practice and decision-making.