CHLA 2007 Thursday 31st May

Day two of the CHLA conference opened with the CHLA AGM, so I took that as an excuse to sleep in after the previous night’s effort! The first keynote was at 9.30 am and was given by Jeremy Grimshaw, Director, Clinical Epidemiology Ottawa Health Research Institute. His talk concentrated on the new buzz term : knowledge translation (KT) – how the evidence (knowledge) translates into practice, or changes the way in which clinicians practice. Jeremy started by reminding us that it was nearly 10 years ago in 1998 that Schuster et al wrote of the lack of the use of evidence in practice in the Millbank Memorial Quarterly. He warned of believing some of the hype that can surround research results, (beware of the noise to signal ratio) and felt that the development of clinical practice guidelines has been one of the most positive and helpful development of recent years. Jeremy recommended publications by JP Ioannidis, who’s written a lot on knowledge translation into practice. He particularly recommended his articles in Nature Genetics (2001), Am J Med (2003), J Translational Med (2004) and JAMA (2005).
Second speaker of the morning was Anne Brice from the UK National Library for Health. Anne’s brief was to give a summary of the UK situation, and she amused us mightily by describing the changes and reorganisations the UK NHS has gone through in the last 10 years. John Loy, UK Chasing the Sun Administrator, who’s worked for the NHS for 5 years, has already been through two major reorganisations. NHS staff don’t have business cards any more. Their titles and organisations’ names change too frequently! Anne mentioned the work of Muir Grey in creation of the National Knowledge Service, and that within the NKS, the National Library for Health aims to provide a modern hybrid, network-based, library service for the NHS, providing seamless access to knowledge resources. As an aside, Anne mentioned that she works one day a week on a project known as Duets, based in Oxford. Duets = Database of Unknown Effects of Treatment – that is, a database of what we don’t know! She ended her talk with one or Muir Grey’s beliefs – that what will transform health care in the 21st century is the well-informed patient.
After morning tea there was a panel discussion on the progress of the development of a National Library for Health for Canada. Its development is being driven largely by CHLA with input from other large bodies such as CISTI. This session generated much heated discussion, as it’s clear that there are several models for the NLH and sound justifications for them all. One concern that emerged more than once was the importance of local input / badging of any service. Several delegates feared that local identities may be at risk of being lost. Clearly, Canada and Australia face similar issues in the development of any nation-wide service, and CHLA will be sharing information regarding developments of the Canadian NLH with HLA.
Lunch and Learn with Ovid was a light-hearted update from the local Ovid team, with plenty of trivia questions and prizes. (I didn’t win anything!)
After lunch, I attended a session with three varied papers: the first, an analysis of how well various search engines find open access journals, the second, a summary of classes in Google searching and finally, a fun session on using web 2.0 tools. Not surprisingly, paper 1 reported that open access publications aren’t as easy to find as they could be, and some resources do a better job than others. The sample was small (14 titles), but making allowances for the small number it’s interesting that PubMed was 2.5 times more likely to find OA journals than Medline (searched via Ovid).
Google – the course was developed with the idea “if you can’t beat them, join them” and to instil better searching skills into the users. The course was a success, not only because they were well attended, but also because it raised the profile of the library, the librarians were perceived as “knowing stuff”, and the users came back for training in the more traditional library databases, realising that they needed those skills after all! Hmm.
The Web 2.0 tools paper covered some of the tools that can be used effectively by libraries – blogs, podcasts, rss feeds and instant messaging are right up there. I want to start playing with these toys – I mean tools – and soon!
After the break, John Loy gave a talk on the Chasing the Sun service, with both of us fielding questions afterwards. There’s a lot of interest on the part of Canadian health librarians in the service, and John and I continued discussions after our session and through into the gala dinner at the Arts Centre.
Don’t worry – we stopped enough to enjoy a Shakespearean Troupe’s execution (note the word) of Romeo and Juliet (rap style), and what was probably one of the funniest renditions of the wall scene from Midsummer Night’s dream I’ve ever seen. It had nothing to do with the liquid refreshment at all! Another late night.