National Public Health Week 2024 celebrates collaboration, cooperation, and partnerships in public health. The theme is “Protecting, Connecting and Thriving: We Are All Public Health.”

At HSLIC, we make resources available that support research in the broad field of public health, and collaborate with faculty and educate students in the College of Population Health.  Ours is a strong partnership. These past two years, as part of a grant from the college to develop an Academic Health Department, HSLIC librarians extended services to New Mexico Department of Health (NM DOH) practitioners. Academic Health Departments are partnerships between an academic institution and a health department. A goal is to strengthen the links between practice and academia, with opportunities for joint education, research and practice.

Librarians developed training modules in the process of evidence-based public health practice. We regularly teach these skills throughout the health sciences professional programs' curricula. A team of librarians, some with public health degrees, customized training to the context of public health and created four modules, following the steps of the process. These included:

    • Module 1: Developing Searchable Questions
    • Module 2: Searching for Evidence
    • Modules 3: A Toolkit for Evaluating Evidence
    • Module 4:  A Toolkit for Applying Evidence

Modules 1 and 2 were offered synchronously online to NM DOH personnel last spring, and all modules are now available to anyone through the UNM Digital Repository at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/er/

In addition, HSLIC became the partner library for NM DOH's Public Health Digital Library, a project of the Network of the National Library of Medicine. This means that New Mexico public health personnel have access not only to the hundreds of books, journals, and databases in that library but, if an item is not available, HSLIC will provide it from our collection or from another library. This greatly extends the scope of information sources available to practitioners.

At HSLIC we recognize and support the valuable work of public health practitioners. We are all public health!