The New York Area Health Education Center in collaboration with the Hospital Library Services Program of the Western New York Library Resources Council will facilitate access to, use, and delivery of biomedical information to health care professionals working in health professional shortage areas in the six counties of Western New York. The goal of this project is to ensure that all health care professionals including physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, dentists, social workers and allied health professionals have access to the information they need to provide quality care for their patients. This goal will be achieved by accomplishing the following specific aims: 1) ensure that health care professionals practicing in the selected Clinical Practice Units (CPUs), located in the designated under served communities, have access to the information they need to provide quality care to their patients; 2) provide computer resources on-site in CPUs to enable health care practitioners to access medical information via PubMed, Internet Grateful Med, and the World Wide Web; 3) teach health care professionals how to access quality, cost-effective information that is user friendly and will result in improved patient care; 4) develop a cadre of well trained health care professionals who can serve as mentors and role models to students and residents in using medical information resources to provide quality care to patients and 5) create a virtual, community-academic primary care clinical practice network whose mission is to support excellence in patient care and multi disciplinary education. The distinguishing characteristic of this project will be to make the National library of Medicine?s databases immediately accessible to these professionals by placing computes in the practitioners? clinical practice units. The funding received from the National Library of Medicine will be used to purchase the computer hardware and software required to access PubMed, Internet Grateful Med and the World Wide Web. Funds also will be required to hire and train a .50 F.T.E circuit librarian. The librarian will promote the project among potential participants, train health care professionals to use the systems, ensure an open dialogue among participants and evaluate the project?s outcome.
| Byrnes, Jennifer A; Kulick, Tracy A; Schwartz, Diane G (2004) Information-seeking behavior changes in community-based teaching practices. J Med Libr Assoc 92:334-40 |
