Introduction

This short story was written by the author Ernest Miller Hemingway. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, and died on July 2, 1961. He was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, in the USA. After high school he worked for a short time as a reporter for the newspaper the Kansas City Star, leaving in 1918 to become an ambulance driver during World War One, from where he returned home seriously wounded in early 1919. In 1921, with his first wife, he went to Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, becoming part of the ‘Lost Generation’ expatriate community in Paris. He went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War and during World War Two he reported on the Normandy landings in 1944 and the liberation of Paris in 1945. When Hemingway was in his early 20s he dreamed of writing fiction, so journalism was primarily a day job, while he awaited his chance as a writer of fiction. He became one of the most prominent American authors of the 20th century, publishing seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Although he often stayed in Europe, his permanent residence was in Florida in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1959 he moved to Idaho, where he committed suicide in 1961.

Documentation in human life: a scream as the first document in Life

When the umbilical cord is cut immediately after their birth, the baby screams, and by that action creates their first document. The scream demonstrates that they are alive and have a voice. It documents that they are a human being. The baby uses their voice to show the world that they are a human being. They will probably use their eyes, body and gestures in addition to their voice, but if they were mute it would be difficult for other people to be aware of them if they were not right next to each other. The voice matters as an instrument for a human being’s survival. If one is not able to use that instrument, one needs other instruments to document to other people that one is alive: to one’s parents, siblings, grandparents, to nurses, etc.

Just as much as the baby needs their voice to scream, their mother and father need to be able to listen, to have a hearing organ and not to be deaf. The act of listening and hearing the scream is just as much an act of documentation as the screaming. The mother creates her own document by distinguishing the sound waves as a scream in contrast to chaotic noise, using her ears and her brain to hear and to identify it as a scream. If the mother is in another room, it may be difficult to hear the baby scream and she may use a microphone and a small loudspeaker to transmit the scream. If she has impaired hearing, she may use hearing aids to hear her baby. Both the embodied voice and the microphone are instruments for documentation, just as pen, paper, and computer are for writing and reading stories and messages beyond one’s immediate surroundings.

If you cannot document, you cannot communicate. Communication is about making something common, to share something with other people, to create a community. To share something with other people, to be a part of the community, it is necessary to get their attention – by screaming, for instance; and people need to be able to hear it. The very first community that a human is a part of is their family, and the next community will be either the local community or the nation they will belong to.

Introduction

When Mozart composed his Requiem, a score was created. When Hemingway wrote his short story, a written story was created. When Munch painted his paintings, he made a painting to be exhibited in galleries. When Kjærgaard wrote his dissertation, a monograph was created to be read and defended in the scientific community. All those documents can be stored and preserved in a library, museum, or archive.

A march cannot be stored in a library, nor in a museum or archive. Nevertheless, it is also a document. In fact, every single moment in all persons’ lives is, in principle, a document demonstrating by means of the human body the life of the person, even though it is not stored outside the human body.

Some moments are more planned and formalized, following a tradition or rules, and become rites shared by many people. We know these kinds of moments from everyday life like the daily meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have meetings that follow a standard procedure. In religious life we have many rites, from the ordinary church services to different kinds of masses. In political life we also have many kinds of rites, both within the formal governmental framework and outside, in political movements.

All these rites are live documents. They are physically created by human bodies. They are organized by a human social organization and they are conceived as an important configuration for the people involved.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, was such a political rite and, as such, a live document. It was created by a group of active people and embodied by thousands of people who took part. It also had an impact on political life and has been remembered by not only its participants, but in the world in general, and it has been an object for discussion and research. In this chapter I will investigate how this live document was created and how it has been an important live document in society afterwards.

March

Throughout human history there have been marches, gathering people together to celebrate someone or something and to show power. Those in power in society have used marches, processions, or parades to show people their power, to demonstrate their power to represent their power, to prove their power.

Introduction

On May 7, 1991, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Jens Erik Floor, wrote that the dissertation ‘The Danish Revolution, 1500–1800: An Ecohistorical Interpretation’ by Thorkild Kjærgaard had been accepted for public defense on December 6, 1991 at 1 p.m. at the University of Copenhagen.

A doctoral dissertation is one of the most iconic forms of documentation in the scientific world, through which one proves the value of and trust in science both within and outside the scientific world subsystem. In this chapter we will investigate the documentation processes and documents in connection with the doctoral dissertation to show how the continuous evaluation of scientific documentation works.

Science: a subsystem

Like classical music, literature, and the visual arts, sciences also form a specific subsystem in society. It is characterized by:

• • the primary activity – scientific research and education in science;

• • the core institutions – universities, academies, labs and academic organizations, and the social group of academia;

• • a shared and preserved scientific language subdivided into different disciplines and fields.

Science has a long history when one considers it as the systematic collection of knowledge. In the 2nd century AD, the ancient Mesopotamians collected knowledge on medical issues, on natural materials, and about the universe. In even this brief description we can already identify an important feature of science: the systematization or classification of objects or phenomena.

Next after the classification of objects or phenomena comes the detailed description of those objects or phenomena. This description is supposed to follow a certain method. Besides classification and description, there are collections of the objects themselves in museums, and collections of descriptions in libraries and archives. These descriptions form some of the first scientific literature. Then there is the book, the monograph, written by a scientist; there are also important scientific journals, from the time of the Renaissance onwards, with an editor and editorial board, in which scientific articles following a specific format are published. The scientific accounts of objects or phenomena explain why they exist. To do this scientifically, it must be done in a transparent way, demonstrating how proofs have been carried out and presenting the results in a specific way that has been reviewed by one’s scientific colleagues in a peer review.

Introduction

When Mozart documented his skills as a composer by composing the Requiem, he documented his identity as composer. In similar ways Ernest Hemingway, Edvard Munch, Thorkild Kjærgaard, and the many thousands of marchers documented their respective identities as writer, painter, scientist, and political activists, representing as well as relating them to different subsystems, different worlds: the classical music world, the literary world, the visual arts world, the scientific world, and the political world.

In the modern world we are all involved in different subsystems, but each one of us is also a part of two of the world’s oldest subsystems: the family-kinship subsystem and the national-state subsystem. These two subsystems also provide us with the most fundamental identities in life: our family and citizenship. To document that we belong to a family and that we are citizens we have personal names and passports or other kinds of identity certificate.

We document our identity as persons with our personal name; our personal history with a date of birth and a life story. Our personal name also documents our relationship to our parents and family. My full name is Niels Jorn Windfeld Lund. My parents decided to give me that name when I was baptized in 1949. My first name, Niels, was probably chosen by my parents because it was frequently used in Denmark in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but Jørn refers to my father, whose name was Jørn Windfeld Lund, and thus documents my relation to my father. Windfeld refers to my paternal grandmother, Ellen Windfeld, who came from an old and large family by the name of Windfeld which can be traced back to the early 17th century. My grandmother Ellen Windfeld married my grandfather Simon Kerstens Andersen Lund who came from a peasant family without a family name but that came from a small place in Denmark called Forumlund, which place name provided an ancestor with the last name Lund. In this way my father’s last name documented both his mother’s and his father’s family.

When I was named, I could have had my mother’s maiden name, Kjeldbjerg, as a middle name and my father’s name, Windfeld Lund, as my last name, resulting in Niels Jørn Kjeldbjerg Windfeld Lund or Niels Jørn Kjeldbjerg Lund.

Introduction

Most employers recognise that the workforce is the most important asset of the organisation. This is certainly true within healthcare knowledge and library services where evidence has repeatedly illustrated the economic benefit that this staff group bring to the NHS by releasing time for busy healthcare professionals (Economics by Design, 2020).

To perform efficiently and to cater for the evolving needs of healthcare, it is crucial that the workforce has opportunities to develop and expand their skills. Often, the provision of training and development are seen as an easy target when funds are short. False economies are made by cutting back on training and development opportunities that leave the workforce with less of the crucial knowledge and skills needed to help the organisation develop (Kumar, 2015, 16). By contrast, a recent European study (Dietz and Zwick, 2020, 712) found that credible training and development opportunities can increase retention rates by up to 18%.

As steward of NHS knowledge and library services in England, Health Education England (HEE) hold the remit for the provision of learning and development for the knowledge and library services workforce. This chapter outlines HEE’s approach to identifying, planning and delivering the training and development needs of the healthcare knowledge and library services workforce. Although these interventions are described in the context of HEE, the reader will note that many of the approaches are generic and may be transferrable to similar contexts elsewhere.

For the avoidance of doubt, it should be noted that this chapter focuses on exploring the needs of the knowledge and library workforce rather than the needs of service users and customers.

Establishing routes into the sector

The training and development needs of the healthcare knowledge and library services workforce begin before they take up their roles within healthcare libraries. Future members of the workforce need an awareness of the sector and an insight into the roles and types of work undertaken by healthcare knowledge and library specialists. This awareness and knowledge is essential, not least because it sparks an interest in work within healthcare and prompts applications for posts.

HEE has taken a proactive approach to promoting roles in healthcare knowledge and library services at a number of different levels.

Higher education institutions

Knowledge and library specialists working in professional roles within healthcare will often hold a CILIP accredited master’s degree in a knowledge, library and information related subject.

Introduction

The learning outcomes in this chapter include a greater understanding of advocacy as a skill that all knowledge and library staff should utilise to promote and develop their service; the importance of identifying key stakeholders and understanding their needs; and how advocacy skills can be nurtured in knowledge and library specialists.

This chapter will explore the importance of advocacy for knowledge and library staff working in healthcare and how health knowledge and library specialists can use their advocacy skills to tailor services for stakeholders. In healthcare knowledge and library services, the need to advocate for services, skills and space is linked to the large, changeable organisations and workforces they serve.

Most knowledge and library specialists working in a health service will have had to defend their service at some point in their career. This may have been in relation to the need for physical or electronic stock, for an appropriate budget, a suitable space and, in some extreme examples, the existence of the entire service. However, the advocacy undertaken in health knowledge and library services also incorporates an element of selling and promotion and many knowledge and library specialists will have developed an internal script they use to sell their services – for example, by showcasing the electronic resources that will benefit the particular person they are speaking to. It is a skill to know what you can use to tempt a new service user, for example, timely current awareness bulletins, time-saving searches or help with a journal club. There is an element of intuitiveness in understanding your service users’ needs, but work should also be undertaken to map your service users and their potential needs for more effective promotion and for service development. Often, the advocacy and promotional activities undertaken lead to the enhancement of essential library services for healthcare staff.

The case studies throughout this chapter will showcase how different knowledge and library services in England have been able to advocate elements of their provision to new groups and then tailor their services to them. A number of themes emerge showing that advocacy in the right situations and circumstances can lead to successful projects and engagement from wider groups. Almost all case studies show that one project will often snowball and lead to further engagement with new service users.

This book brings together health information practitioners with a huge variety of experience across health information work within healthcare knowledge and library services in the NHS in England. If there is one overarching message that can be taken away from this book, it is that healthcare knowledge and library services offer a valuable gift to their medical practitioner colleagues – the ‘gift of time’. This clearly shows why these services offer vital ongoing support in this important sector.

Each chapter focuses on an essential aspect of health information work and provides a practice handbook and an insight into how health information services operate. The provision of healthcare knowledge and library services continues to develop. With this in mind, it should be noted that Health Education England (HEE), which is mentioned in every chapter, ceased to exist and was replaced by NHS England on 1 April 2023. Given that the vast majority of the work took place under the auspices of the HEE, we felt it fitting to recognise and record that contribution here. The work remains as valuable as ever, but remember to bear in mind that the organisation now has a different name.

The chapters do not need to be read in order and you don’t need to read them all. They are standalone, but they are cross-referenced where appropriate. There is a wealth of case studies to show how the ideas put forward here are put into practice. Each chapter has a reference list and there are suggestions for further reading as appropriate.

The book contains an introductory chapter setting the scene and detailing the structure of the NHS and the health information landscape. What follows is a series of in-depth, practitioner focused chapters that describe all aspects of healthcare, knowledge and library work in the health sector.

Chapter 1 is an exploration of the wider healthcare environment, including an overview of the complex structure of the NHS and how the healthcare, knowledge and library services work within this framework.

Chapter 2 foregrounds how the training development needs of health information practitioners are identified and met.

Chapter 3 explains how information, knowledge and library services support the critical area of evidenced-based practice that is necessary for a successful health service.

Chapter 4 describes how information practitioners successfully advocate for their services by building meaningful relationships between the service, medics and decision makers.

Introduction

Gann and Pratt (2013) observes the need for knowledge and library services to identify ways to evaluate themselves and ensure current measures have meaning for those outside the library world and in the context of an organisation’s mission and objectives.

Strategic direction is important for library services. Strategy outlines the aims, vision and intentions of the service, providing an outline of work to be undertaken. For stakeholders, customers and others outside the library team, the strategy provides a reference point to understand what the library service is aiming to achieve and assures senior colleagues that the library’s goals are aligned to and support those of the wider organisation. The strategy also serves as a reminder for those working in the service of high level goals, which can easily be forgotten due to the focus on day-to-day operational tasks.

However, there is a danger that strategies can become ‘shelf-ware’ – documents that are produced every few years but which have little day-today influence on the library service. To help ensure that the strategy becomes a reality, it is important to establish processes that turn these strategic plans into actions. This can be achieved with implementation plans with SMART targets (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Relevant, Time Bound) (see also Chapter 2). High level strategic plans can be broken down into more manageable objectives, each with specific actions attached, against which progress can be more easily tracked.

Health Education England’s national Knowledge for Healthcare strategy was first launched in 2014 (Health Education England, 2014) and refreshed in 2021 (Health Education England, 2021a). The strategy was implemented using workstreams and task and finish groups made up of both the Health Education England knowledge and library team and volunteers from healthcare knowledge and library services in England. A range of measures and frameworks were employed to monitor progress against the aims and objectives within the strategy.

This chapter outlines Health Education England’s and healthcare library partners’ approaches to measuring progress, value and impact in relation to the development and improvement of knowledge and library services in England.

Metrics

As with all situations where organisations and services have aims and objectives, or goals they are trying to achieve, it is important to have some means of monitoring progress towards attaining those goals. This enables services to celebrate success where objectives have been achieved and to renew efforts and try different approaches where progress is slower.

Introduction

The ability to reflect on what we do and how we do it is an essential strategy for health professionals working in healthcare organisations. The art of reflection enables practitioners to improve patient care, develop skills and knowledge, improve the quality of services and enhance organisational development. Many higher education courses for healthcare professionals include reflective practice as part of the curriculum. The ability to reflect continues to be relevant throughout careers as it is embedded within ongoing professional development, including revalidation, team debriefs and personal reflection on experiences.

The purpose of this chapter is to help knowledge and library staff to develop these skills. It will encourage the reader to consider the importance of being a reflective practitioner for personal development and to understand how to provide services that also enable healthcare professionals to develop their skills. Furthermore, we will explore how a reflective practice approach is used for team reflection in both healthcare teams and knowledge and library services to facilitate ongoing improvement.

As this book aims to be a practical guide, there will be a summary of some key theories relating to the discipline and models that can be applied to improve reflective practice, alongside some hints and exercises for writing reflectively. A number of case studies are included from people working in knowledge and library services to provide real-life examples of how reflective practice is integral to healthcare professionals working in healthcare organisations.

Theories of reflective practice

There is a huge body of literature relating to reflective practice. This chapter will not provide an exhaustive list but will focus on a couple of theories that will be useful for putting reflective practice into perspective.

The Chartered Institute for Professional Development

The Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD) defines reflective practice as ‘the foundation of professional development’ (CIPD, 2018). It highlights that adopting an approach of reflective practice helps professionals to make meaning from experiences and develop practical strategies for personal growth and organisational impact. Reflective practice is a personal learning journey, enabling practitioners to consider what they can learn from their experiences and develop plans to make changes in the future.

Donald Schon

In his book The Reflective Practitioner, Schon (1991) states that reflection can happen in two ways. First, he describes ‘reflection-in-action’, which is a process of reflecting during an experience or activity.

Introduction

As knowledge specialists we are extraordinarily well placed to see what is before us, what is right in front of our eyes. As we shape the knowledge services of tomorrow, our professional responsibility is to move beyond what we can already discern as we use our information skills to examine the evidence, data and trends and look to action.

Demand for healthcare is rising rapidly everywhere (PWC, 2023) as the world’s population is ageing. Every country in the world is experiencing growth in both the number and the proportion of older people. By 2030, 1 in 6 people will be aged 60 or over, an estimated 1.4 billion people worldwide. Between 2020 and 2050, the number of people aged 80 years or older is expected to triple to reach 426 million (World Health Organization (WHO), 2022).

Governments across the globe face growing pressure to reduce costs without limiting access to care and without impacting on quality. Hence, ‘Health systems are optimising human resources and adopting process-driven advances, standardised procedures and technological innovations to cut costs and improve quality’ (PWC, 2023).

Technological innovation is moving at pace, changing the nature of service delivery across sectors. People are familiar with applications from online shopping, social media and smart personal assistants to banking and travel. By 2015, Boeing 777 airline pilots were reporting that on a typical flight they spent a mere seven minutes manually flying the plane, primarily during takeoff and landing (Markoff, 2015). Data privacy is a concern for many. However, users may be less aware of the risks of bias within the algorithms that lie behind these technologies.

Healthcare is a knowledge intensive sector. Managing and applying knowledge – evidence from research and learning from experience – to better effect are part of the solution to the challenges identified. Investment in proactive knowledge services makes good business sense, impacting on quality, safety, productivity and cost.

The future of healthcare knowledge services is bright; it lies in the hands of our profession and it is important that we get it right.

The future of healthcare

Advances in the field of medicine are extraordinary, often nothing short of revolutionary.

Introduction

What do we mean by ‘resource discovery’? Access to up-to-date information is critical for supporting day-to-day decision making in health. To deliver high quality care and support to patients, service users, carers and families, NHS staff need easy access to current and quality knowledge resources. The vision of HEE’s Knowledge for Healthcare strategy is for staff, learners and the public to use the right knowledge, at the right time, in the right place to achieve excellence in healthcare.

We are talking about resources, such as books, journals and databases, as well as the infrastructure, such as library management systems, discovery systems and authentication.

As we’ve learned in other chapters, this is a distributed, mobile workforce comprising busy, time-poor staff: we cannot always reasonably expect them to visit physical libraries to access printed material, so e-resources are a key means to make knowledge available to the health and care workforce.

A key factor influencing resource discovery in the NHS is of course continuous advances in technology and the growing expectations of ‘digitallysavvy’ generations of staff and learners, to some extent countered by the limitations of information technology in the NHS and the need to support all staff, regardless of digital literacy levels.

Historically, NHS libraries were largely funded from medical education budgets and the content held within them was largely aimed at medical staff. However, libraries have become fully multi-disciplinary and now need to meet the needs not only of all types of clinical staff, but anyone that works in the organisation. As such, the resources they provide need to encompass the needs of all these staff groups as well as the students on placement within the organisation.

Open access has become a growing imperative and we conclude this chapter by defining what this means within a healthcare context and the NHS.

Types of resources

Books

Books often provide useful background or introductory information on a topic. Potentially helpful for healthcare staff at different points throughout their careers, they are particularly popular with those on education courses and students on placement in NHS organisations, who will typically have a recommended reading list from their university.

Book records are added to the catalogues of library management systems (LMS).

Introduction

This chapter introduces evidence-based library and information practice, focusing on the importance of developing the evidence base for healthcare knowledge and library services. It highlights the importance of librarians conducting research to develop the evidence base for the profession. If the research is to grow the evidence base, the authors argue that part of the research process is the sharing of findings. The chapter covers skills both for conducting research and for librarians supporting research teams.

Introducing evidence-based library and information practice

Healthcare librarianship is central to enabling health and care professionals to provide and demonstrate evidence-based practice. Evidence-based practice, which grew out of evidence-based medicine, depends upon access to and application of evidence that is based on research, alongside clinical judgement based on experience (Greenhalgh, 1999). Building on their role in providing evidence to NHS colleagues, healthcare librarians have worked with librarians across other sectors on the development of evidence-based practice for librarianship itself.

Evidence-based library and information practice (EBLIP) is an approach to professional decision-making that grew out of the initial evidence-based medicine movement, when health librarians realised the importance of practising what they were preaching to clinicians (Koufogiannakis and Brettle, 2016a). The most recent model of EBLIP (Koufogiannakis and Brettle, 2016a) promotes an overall approach to practice that is about ‘being evidence-based’ (see Figure 9.1 on the next page) rather than simply using evidence in decision-making. The model acknowledges the use of research evidence, local evidence and professional knowledge (Koufogiannakis, 2011, 53) and a cyclical process involving: articulating problems or questions; assembling the evidence; assessing the evidence; agreeing a way forward; and adapting by revisiting goals and reflecting in order to evaluate what is working and what needs to change (Koufogiannakis and Brettle, 2016b).

The literature on the use of evidence by healthcare librarians and knowledge specialists for their own profession suggests that there is a greater emphasis on supporting evidence-based medicine rather than developing EBLIP (Spring et al., 2014). Murphy uses the analogy of a midwife, enabling others to give birth to research rather than conducting research and publishing to contribute to the evidence base for library and information practice (Murphy, 2015).

In line with the approach to being evidence-based noted in Figure 9.1 above, this chapter considers the importance of developing the evidence base for healthcare knowledge and library services.

Introduction

Working in a health organisation can be a bewildering experience for new knowledge and library service (KLS) staff. Such organisations often have thousands of highly pressured clinical and managerial staff spread across multiple sites, with little time to explain how things work and what all the jargon means.

The good news is that, as a knowledge and library professional, you are already equipped to do lots of finding out for yourself:

• • Start digging, start a set of notes, start a glossary or a set of questions.

• • If it helps, draw up organisational and staff structures. A visual representation works better for some people.

• • Network with knowledge and library colleagues in other health care organisations.

Our experience shows that these come in useful when you, in turn, are helping new staff understand the complex world they have just joined. One of the authors of this chapter used their diagram of the English National Health Service (NHS) as part of the induction for a finance director who had come from a non-health background, earning his gratitude and a friendly smile ever after.

This chapter will help you structure your voyage of discovery as you work out what your new organisation is all about and how it fits into the wider healthcare system of your country. It will also get you thinking about health in its wider societal context.

As we write, the COVID pandemic is an example of a worldwide issue, affecting every person in every country. Knowledge and library specialists play an important role in enabling fellow health staff, the public, patients, families and carers locate and, crucially, use high quality knowledge resources. The services provided by healthcare knowledge and library services ‘take the “heavy lifting” out of getting evidence into practice and give the “gift of time” to healthcare professionals’ (Economics by Design, 2020).

A word on terminology before we get started. We will generally use knowledge and library specialist to mean a person qualified in librarianship to at least degree level, or someone who aspires to be. This term covers a broad spectrum of roles across healthcare including, but not limited to, librarian, information professional and knowledge specialist. Most of our examples will come from the NHS but we believe you will be able to take the questions we think you should ask, find the answers and then apply them in your own home setting.

The world moves on. Change is a constant. So, how do you discern the truth in our ever-changing world?

Health systems across the globe face many similar challenges: ageing populations, often with multiple health conditions; pressure on resources, both financial and human; harnessing emerging technologies to improve healthcare; the impact of climate change and conflicts; finding the best ways to work in partnership; and ensuring that healthcare is managed and delivered in ways that are truly designed for local populations and are fair and inclusive for everyone in society.

In my part of Yorkshire, I lead a new organisation, an Integrated Care Board, where all these issues are part of the ‘everyday’ in providing health and social care to 2.4 million people. Working together, all the NHS organisations in West Yorkshire, including primary care as well as local councils and voluntary organisations, are committed to:

• • Improving health outcomes for all people using information, data and insight

• • Tackling inequality in experiences, outcomes and access

• • Enhancing value for money and productivity

• • Helping support broader social and economic development.

We understand that information, data and insight are crucial in delivering our plans. Knowledge and library specialists are part of the highly skilled workforce that help us ensure that everything we do, from executive decisionmaking to frontline care, from treating complex conditions in big teaching hospitals to everyday care in general practice, is informed by evidence from research and by the experience and the know-how of our staff.

In 2021, writing in support of England’s national strategy for the development of knowledge and library services, Knowledge for Healthcare, I said, ‘Our library and knowledge service enables us to be a learning organisation, ensuring our staff are well supported to make informed decisions and drive innovation.’

Two years on, that is truer than ever. Knowledge and library staff must be an indispensable part of a healthcare system that is changing rapidly and needs fast, reliable and trustworthy information to enable healthcare staff to feel confident that every intervention and clinical decision is underpinned by evidence and best practice.

Making sure we have a well trained health knowledge and library workforce is as important as making sure we have well trained doctors and nurses. So, I am delighted to see this book published as an introduction to the world of health knowledge management and librarianship.

Introduction

Health Education England has acknowledged that there is a need to build and foster effective partnerships nationally and locally so that NHS library and knowledge services can ensure a consistent, equitable, funded core service to learners and staff and offer co-ordinated information to patients and the public (Health Education England, 2016). For public library services in England, Libraries Connected has a well established Universal Health Offer. This builds on the recognition of libraries as trusted spaces that deliver health information and recreational activities to help people better manage their health and wellbeing.

In effect, working with partners is an essential element of service delivery for information practitioners and healthcare decision makers. This chapter will explore the current context for cross-sector partnership working to help you identify potential internal and external partnerships within a health information setting, using case studies as examples. This will enable you to recognise the advantages that partnership working can bring to all involved. The chapter will also describe the key factors for effective partnership working, give some suggestions for implementing and embedding these and consider appropriate outcome measures to capture the impact of partnership working.

This chapter will help you think about partnership working in your current role and provide you with ideas about how to develop your skills and knowledge in this area. Throughout this chapter, we’ve included reflection points to help you think about how you would apply your learning in the real world. For more information on reflective practice and how it can be applied in librarianship see Chapter 11 and also Miller, Ford and Yang (2020).

Current context for cross-sector partnership working

Health Education England (2021) recognises the importance of cross-sector partnership working and the benefit this can have to individuals, organisations and society.

The two case studies discussed in this chapter illustrate this in practice. The first case study is based on an internal partnership within a trust setting and the second case study is a local partnership between differing organisations with a shared goal and interest in health and social care information.

Many educational or healthcare organisations will have a strategic vision discussing and documenting how they support communities’ lifelong learning and encourage cross-sector working and collaboration to support and enhance the development of organisational goals and workforce knowledge and skills.