Dear MAHSLIN Members,
As MAHSLIN begins its 30th year, it is time to look back and see just how far we have come and where we are going. MAHSLIN began on November 17, 1977 under the name of Massachusetts Hospital Library Association. Although I was not involved in medical libraries then, I would guess that the reasons for MAHSLIN’s existence today are not that much different than what they were 30 years ago. We still get together to “schmooze;” there is still resource sharing; and we are still trying to improve our knowledge and skills.
Schmoozing took place at this year’s Annual Meeting on April 27, 2007. In addition to some informative speakers who addressed several different aspects of safety, we got the chance to network with our fellow medical librarians and visit with some of the key vendors in the publishing and database fields.
Alison Clapp and Nathan Norris have taken MAHSLIN’s education programming to an even higher level this past year. We look forward to the programming they have planned for their final year as Co-Chairs of the Education Committee. They are actively recruiting their successors. Please contact either Alison or Nathan if you are interested in chairing or serving on the Education Committee.
Thanks go out again to Jeanie Van der Pyl for all her hard work on the Stat!Ref subscription. This year was even more successful than last year. We have 2 new participants for a total of 26, and added new titles with only a $9.83 increase. Good work Jeanie!!
Last year, Anne Fladger and the Strategic Planning Committee identified 5 possible goals for MAHSLIN; restructure the Executive Board, increase membership, increase awareness of MAHSLIN, pursue collaboration with other organizations, and increase member support. The Executive Board has adopted the goal of increasing membership. The Taskforce on Outreach and Recruitment, headed by Margo Coletti, welcomes and appreciates all ideas, comments, etc.
The MAHSLIN Officers and Committee Chairs for 2007-2008 are:
| President: | Bette Bissonnette | (bbissonnette@saintsmedicalcenter.com) | |
| Vice President/President Elect: | Chris Fleuriel | (Christine_fleuriel@dfci.harvard.edu) | |
| Past President: | Margo Coletti | (mcoletti@bidmc.harvard.edu) | |
| Secretary: | Julia Whelan | (Julia_Whelan@hms.harvard.edu) | |
| Treasurer: | Pat Vigorito | (pvigorito@mortonhospital.org) | |
| Archives Committee: | Melinda Saffer Marchand | (mesaffer@comcast.net) | |
| ByLaws: | Kathy McCarthy | (Kathy_mccarthy@sshosp.org) | |
| Education: | Alison Clapp | (Alison.clap@childrens.harvard.edu) | |
| Nathan Norris | (nnorris@bidmc.harvard.edu) | ||
| Membership: | Brandy King | (Brandy_King@childrens.harvard.edu) | |
| Nominating: | Rhoda Moskowitz | (rhoda.moskowitz@mwmc.com) | |
| Publicity: | Ed Sperr | (sperr@nelinet.net) | Web Coordinator |
| Dorothy Barr | (dbarr@oeb.harvard.edu) | MAHSLIN News Co-Editor | |
| Megan McNichol | (mmcnichol1@partners.org) | MAHSLIN News Co-Editor | |
| Resource Sharing: | Jeanie M. Van der Pyl | (jvanderpyl@capecodhealth.org) | |
| Technology Liaison: | Penny Glassman | (Penny.Glassman@umassmed.edu) |
MAHSLIN is the strongest and most active state organization in New England. However, it is only as strong as the members who volunteer to run it. In other words, WE NEED YOU AND YOUR IDEAS TO HELP KEEP MAHSLIN ON TOP. It is a very small time commitment that goes a long way. Call me at 978-934-8308 or email bbissonnette@saintsmedicalcenter.com if you want to help.
A dreary start to the day did not keep us from having an excellent meeting. The focus was safety, and the speakers covered this topic from different perspectives, from mind-boggling numbers to very local efforts within our own institutions. I would be the first to admit that John Halamka’s talk was much more interesting than I would have thought it could be, and I appreciated the difficulties of accomplishing his committee’s tasks on target. Karen Jacobs’ discussion of ergonomics was pertinent and light-hearted. Georgia Pierce’s talk about the culture of safety brought the matter close to home with the example of her aunt’s care. Margo and Donna did a great job of helping us understand how important words and parts of them can be, especially if they aren’t used correctly or if people just don’t understand them. Dr. Dumaresq’s presentation on the role of pharmacy was enlightening, and it’s always interesting to me to learn about others’ jobs, because it can help me help them.
What would any meeting be without food? Of course, with the rain first thing in the morning, it was welcome to have hot coffee and tea to warm us and all the other treats during the breaks. Lunch was quite delicious, but the food somehow tasted better as we toasted and celebrated the achievements of our members.
The first ever Paul Vaiginas award went to Alison Clapp and Nathan Norris for their absolutely outstanding work as co-chairs of the MAHSLIN Education Committee. The Hall of Fame award went rightfully to Lyn Dietrich and Lucretia McLure for being repositories of knowledge and mentors over the years.
There’s no guarantee on the weather for this next year, but I’ll see what I can do. And I will try my best to come close to equaling this year’s meeting.
I wanted to update the membership regarding the Medspeak project, which was described at the MAHSLIN Annual Meeting. A committee was formed to work on the initial rewrite of the brochure into language understandable by low literacy readers, and included the following MAHSLIN members: Dorothy Barr, Donna Beales, Alison Clapp (coordinator), Margo Coletti, James Craig, Carolyn Dooman, Michelle Eberle, Chris Fleuriel, Cara Helfner, Meg McNichol, Nathan Norris, Danielle Tawa and Jeanie VanderPyl. This group includes some who have had extensive experience “translating” documents into Plain Language and others who had little or no experience.
The committee initially worked in teams of two. Each member was given a portion of the original Medspeak brochure, which they rewrote in Plain Language. After completing their rewrite, the teams swapped their sections for review by their partners. After this initial review, everyone returned their sections to the coordinator. We had several elementary age students look over the brochure and encouraged them to offer suggestions, particularly if they did not understand a definition. After receiving these comments and further editing the brochure, the entire committee looked at the completed document to see if there were additional changes we wanted to make. After this final revision, the Medspeak brochure was sent to MLA in the middle of July, and we are now waiting to hear from them.
If MLA chooses to continue with this MAHSLIN-sponsored Medspeak project, we will be involving the entire MAHSLIN membership with the revision of the additional subject brochures! Working as partners within a larger group worked well for the initial Medspeak brochure and is one possible model going forward. Please be thinking of how you can contribute to this very valuable project.
Librarians are one of the many professional groups that have recognized and discussed the health literacy problem. Here is the opportunity to make the most of your expertise as health sciences librarians and to do more than that by taking part in creating and offering tools that are clearly needed by patients, health care consumers, and clinicians!
For those of you who are not NAHSL members (and you should consider joining as the annual meeting alone is always informative, not to mention the scholarships, etc.), Hongjie Wang, the NAHSL CE Chair, just posted a listserv message which we think is worth repeating:
If you are interested in getting MLA CE credits either for professional development or building your AHIP portfolio, please note that there are several ways to pursue them. You don’t even have to leave your office to get them! The following summarizes the sources that might be of interest to you.
MAHSLIN will be hosting the MLA Webcast on scholarly publishing so...PLEASE SAVE THE DATE—November 7, 2007.
The Education Committee is considering offering a QuickDoc class with MAHSLIN’s own Jay Daly. Most of us know the QuickDoc basics, but this is a powerful software with more features than most of us may be using. While Jay will cover some of the basics (for those who are new to the software), much of the emphasis will be on reports, general good “practices” in terms of database management and similar topics. Please let us know if you are interested in this class and what features in particular you would like Jay to cover.
Thank you!
The MAHSLIN group purchase of STAT!Ref has entered its second successful year. Twenty-six libraries now take advantage of this great deal for our members. Participants have access to the 21 books and 3 free resources in our collection.
The collection of books changed slightly this year. Some titles that had been included in last year’s collection were cancelled, based on low usage by the group. New titles were added, based on input and voting by the group’s members. In this year’s selection, we added 3 new nursing books.
As we finalized our title selection and also tried to establish individual members’ costs, two additional libraries decided to join the group. By adding more members, the pricing was dropped to a very affordable $1257/library. NELINET again handled the contract review and also the invoicing for MAHSLIN.
Sharing access to this collection has proven to be a positive experience for the MAHSLIN members who have joined this group. Once the annual subscription is set up— soliciting members, selecting titles and calculating costs--- this resource basically operates without any many problems. We also get great support from Karen Ennis, our regional STAT!Ref representative, and Shannon McYoung, our Account Manager based in Colorado. STAT!Ref also offers great marketing materials which can be customized with your library information.
The Board has continued its commitment to investigating other resources our members would benefit from sharing. I hope that some of you were able to try out the Rittenhouse R2 trial announced at the Annual Meeting in April. If enough libraries were interested in titles from this collection, we could negotiate a discount for your individual collections. Unlike STAT!Ref where we share a common collection, R2’s savings would be based on the number of titles that were individually subscribed to by our members. So if you are considering any R2 titles, please let me know.
Brandy King, Membership Chair, reports that she has updated the membership list (available on the MAHSLIN website at http://www.mahslin.org/mahdir.htm. Also, we have a new member: Jennifer Ditkoff, who is the new librarian at the Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, MA. Welcome, Jennifer!
(Submitted by Frank Landry, Medical Library Manager, HealthAlliance Hospitals Medical Library in Leominster)
The following letter appeared in Topics in Advanced Practice Nursing 2007;7(1) (c)2007; posted 06/26/2007
Editor's Note:
This letter was received from a medical officer serving in Iraq, in response to donations he received after we posted this article on Medscape: The Power of an Idea: Help for Iraqi Medical Professionals. Donations are still being accepted. Contact dgifford@hot.rr.com for up-to-date information on what is needed and where to mail donations.
I just wanted to write a quick note to give those back home who donated the medical and nursing books some feedback on our recent hospital and clinic book distribution. Our "area of operations" involves the towns and cities just north of Baghdad. One of our local national hospitals was shut down by terrorists and the other was looted, so we have a ways to go — but certainly progress is being made.
I find it very rewarding to work with the doctors in the area — they are very apolitical and just want to do their jobs in safety. We have a complete mix of Sunni and Shi'a Arabs in our area and I can't think of a doctor that I've met who wouldn't care for someone from the "other" sect. They really do serve as role models for the rest of the country.
Needless to say, the doctors and nurses were absolutely thrilled with the donated books. Most helpful were the recent primary care texts and journals (pediatrics, internal medicine, OB/GYN, and family practice). I will send the recent journals and texts for the subspecialties (oncology, anesthesiology, etc) into Baghdad to one of our sister units for the hospitals there.
Although many of the doctors have some difficulty speaking English, they can read it without problem as they used English-language texts while in medical school. It was wonderful to watch them turn over the books in their hands — looking at them like they were made of gold! One doctor kept pointing at a journal from February of this year — he couldn't believe that he had such a recent journal in his hands. To further encourage the doctors to work together, I purposely supplied the largest clinic with the largest number of journals to create the first "medical library" in the area since the war…
The writer is a physician and a medical officer with the 1st Cavalry Division, currently in Iraq.