Patient Safety Awareness Week is March 10-16; it's an opportunity to encourage learning about health care safety. Patient safety is the concern of everyone on the health care team, and that includes librarians.
Some ways in which librarians and libraries contribute to patient safety:
- Provide authoritative point-of-care resources for quick retrieval of information at the time of need
- Participate in clinical rounds to understand the context of questions as they arise and respond with relevant information from quality resources
- Serve on safety committees and institutional review boards
- Conduct literature searches for current guidelines, best practices
- Provide 24/7 access to databases that contain current information about drugs, interactions, therapeutics, and peer-reviewed full-text articles
- Educate health care personnel in the efficient use of resources
Physicians, residents, and nurses at 118 hospitals (16,122 respondents to a survey) considered a recent patient care situation and reported changes in "advice given to the patient (48%), diagnosis (25%), and choice of drugs (33%), other treatment (31%), and tests (23%)" based on information provided by the librarian or library." They indicated that the "information allowed them to avoid the following adverse events: patient misunderstanding of the disease (23%), additional tests (19%), misdiagnosis (13%), adverse drug reactions (13%), medication errors (12%), and patient mortality (6%)." [1]
When you have a question, or are making a health care decision, our goal at HSLIC is to deliver current, accurate, and evidence-based information.
- Marshall JG, et al. The value of library and information services in patient care: results of a multisite study. J Med Libr Assoc. 2013 Jan;101(1):38-46. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.101.1.007. PMID: 23418404; PMCID: PMC3543128.
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