The aims of our Outreach Service are:

• To bring the Library and Knowledge Service to the workplace of all staff throughout the Trust, providing a flexible service tailored to needs.
  
  
• To provide support and training to help staff access information and research for work, education, personal development, research and training.

In Person

To facilitate working in partnership with teams and individuals the outreach librarian can –

Attend

• multidisciplinary team meetings
• corporate meetings
• journal clubs and help with critical appraisal.

Respond to questions that arise in the clinical or corporate setting

• by carrying out literature searches of the available evidence
• by using information retrieval and critical appraisal skills
• by contributing to the development of audits, guidelines and care pathways
• by providing information to support individual patient care.

Provide

• abstracts of relevant articles
• full text where appropriate
• details of search strategies and resources used.

Give presentations and training

• to individuals or groups
• at staff meetings/protected learning time
• to boost your information retrieval skills
• at a time and place to suit you.

Remotely

The Library Service provides information to you directly in your workplace.

Through the provision of:

• online resources – electronic books (through our catalogue), journals and databases. An NHS Athens login is required for all these resources.
• books and journal articles – sent to your workplace by internal mail
• literature searches
• current awareness services – available for a variety of topics
• journal alerts – emailed table of contents for latest issues
• subject alerts – updates on topics of personal interest.

The Library Outreach Service helps anyone who needs to find the research evidence to support their work.

The Benefits

To patients

• quality patient care
• individualised care on the basis of the best evidence available
• well managed services

To staff

• time saved
• provision of quality-assured information
• best evidence identified
• bridging the literature-practice gap, overcoming barriers to getting information into practice

To our Trust

• provision of a mechanism to support a questioning and learning culture
• promotion of evidence-based practice to ensure clinical and corporate decisions are supported by research.