Publications

Orthopaedic Institute Annual Report – Francis Costello Library
The Francis Costello Library (FCL) team have continued to develop the services we deliver across the Trust over a busy and successful year. Our Library Strategy for the period 2017– 2020 was published last year which aligned our goals with the key themes of RJAH.

We are once again grateful to Jan Herman Kuiper for delivering sessions on critical appraisal skills and medical statistics. This training was facilitated by FCL, and as always was very well received. FCL continues to provide specialist librarian support to the Musculoskeletal Critically Appraised Topics group, which works towards evidenced based improvements to clinical practice. In 2017 we invested in KnowledgeShare, a web based current awareness service, which allows us to set up tailored information updates for our staff, ensuring they have access to timely, current evidence-based material relevant to their role.

We continue to grow our outreach model, which includes our work with nursing teams supporting the STAR performance assessment framework. Library team members regularly meet with nursing teams, and as a result have raised awareness of the services available. Requests for literature searches continue to grow, reflecting the evidence based work of the Trust. We have helped to set up and facilitate several journal clubs which encourage discussion and review of the literature. Discussions with ward staff led us to explore how we could help enhance the experience of our long term patients; whilst our service is not appropriate for patients to access directly we have worked in partnership with our local public library to enable some of our long term patients to access library services. We have recruited a volunteer who is visiting this group of patients on a regular basis, enabling patients to borrow both print and audio books, and access electronic resources. This service is proving popular with our patients.

We continue to work with our users to investigate how we can make the library space more accessible and relevant to our staff. We have reorganised the library stock, making the library more user friendly, and as a result of discussions with our SpRs we have created an Orthopaedic Exam Collection.

The work we are doing has recently been recognised nationally, as we are finalists in the Sally Hernando Innovation awards for our work with the nursing teams, and also the poster display we facilitated to share and disseminate good practice and learning across the Trust.

The FCL team continue to deliver an extremely high quality service to our users, and this is reflected in our annual score for the Library Quality Assurance Framework, which has increased to 100%. 2017-18 has been a busy and successful year for the Francis Costello Library, and we look forward to developing our service further in the coming year.

Lis Edwards
– Library Services Manager