LAUSR

Hospital Librarians strive to keep current with quality relevant medical literature, especially those topics important to the care delivered at their hospitals. They set up current awareness profiles and electronic tables of contents to stay up-to-the-minute. Interesting articles are pushed to the caregivers. Librarians think about literature in an evidence-based way. They coach and teach searching the literature in an evidence-based way or retrieve literature to support patient care and research filtered for quality methodology. A journal club is one of many ways for the hospital librarian to be involved in helping their constituencies keep up with the 750,000 articles published in biomedical and clinical research each year. Leading, supporting, partnering with the continuing education department, or working within a curriculum, are samples of how the hospital librarian contributes to a journal club. This column highlights different formats, groups of participants and topics for journal clubs and the hospital librarian’s contribution to making the journal club successful. The contribution may start with establishing a solid understanding of evidence-based practice in the participants. This may be in a journal club pre-session where the librarian can do some teaching by showing how the article can be retrieved. Perhaps the librarian could lead the participants in PICOing the article. Librarians can lend their expertise to find the literature, as well as handling the scheduling of the meeting, publicizing the club, selecting the article, supplying the critical appraisal tool, deciding whether to be a member or leader of the club, sending out thank yous for participating, setting up incentives for top contributions; basically, doing whatever else is needed in helping to make it happen in person or online. Conducting journal clubs is not a new idea. It is said that William Osler conducted the first journal club at McGill University in 1875 for his attendees to apply their updated knowledge to relevant patient cases. Since then the concept of the journal club remains the same, build a community spirit of learning and practice, learn something new, improve reading habits, be aware of research methods, practice critical appraisal and apply that information to practice. McLeod listed in a 2010 article in Medical Teacher, recommendations