How Librarians Ensure Access to Evidence-Based Health Care

Many academic librarians teach students how information is produced and organized. This can include how a journal article is written and peer-reviewed, as well as how search engines and databases work. The goal is to help learners find, evaluate, and use the information they need. This is especially important for students entering jobs in health care, where knowing how to find the latest or best evidence can be a matter of life and death.

The health-care professionals who serve the public must navigate a lot of information—new studies are published all the time, and conflicting evidence is abundant. While it’s normal for those of us who don’t work in health care to follow science, we expect our health-care providers to have wisdom.

For example, I may be frustrated by conflicting studies about whether or not eggs are healthy to eat. However, I expect a dietician—an expert in nutrition—to understand the nuances and make an evidence-based recommendation for their patients. While they learn a lot of facts in school before they practice, they also develop critical thinking skills to apply what they know to their patients.

Librarians who work with these students are often quite involved with teaching them critical thinking skills, going beyond demonstrating how to find articles. These librarians help learners develop strategies to fit their professional needs in whatever context they may end up in. 

For example, many dentists are trained at schools with abundant resources, like databases and subscriptions to journals that are expensive to purchase. However, most of these dentists don’t work at universities or hospitals with large budgets; they work in clinics and are often responsible for running them as businesses. This means they must decide if they would rather spend their money on new equipment or on access to journal articles. They will most often choose the former.

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Many librarians help dental students become more comfortable with free resources that offer access to high-quality research, most notably PubMed. This allows them to find answers to their clinical questions without having to pay for a large database they might never have the chance to use. 

When you look up many health professions in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, you can see that most work in clinics, schools, or other smaller places without access to the large databases that universities have. It is critical that they learn how to find the best evidence in a way that is authentic to where they will end up working. 

Librarians do more than teach students. They have also been pivotal in advocating for access to more full-text articles for health-care providers. While PubMed is a great way for people to discover what they’d like to read more of, they often still have to pay for individual articles. Some libraries secure funding to provide articles to health-care providers for free, like in Utah and Oregon. Other states, like Washington and North Carolina, have created portals where health-care providers can access evidence-based information, including some they would normally have to pay for. 

While public libraries offer a wide array of resources for their communities, they often cannot also purchase access to the specialized resources required for quality health care. By advocating for health-care providers, specifically to improve access to information, librarians are helping enhance the quality of health care throughout their states.

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries. 

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