Collaborative Community Health Service Models: An opportunity to develop health literature search skills required for systematic review processes

An IWK Division of Community Pediatrics Pilot Project initiated in January, 2012 will operate until December, 2013.  The mandate of this project is to promote and evaluate a collaborative model of pediatric care and pediatric learning between the IWK and a community setting.

The project evaluation plan requires a review of the literature on collaborative community health services and service models.  The evaluation team is particularly interested in acquiring research literature related to pediatric collaborative community health services.  This reading course provides an opportunity for SIM class of 2013 graduates to obtain course credit in a health area.

The student who undertakes this reading course will be involved in two types of review, a literature review and a jurisdictional review.

The student will conduct:

• A literature search to support a literature review.  The work will begin with a search plan.  The search will be executed following Cochrane Review search methods.
• A jurisdictional review of existing Canadian community pediatric clinics with academic affiliations using a structured interview to identify:
  • Existing collaborative practice models
  • Nature of pediatric practice – i.e. consultative, primary care
  • Outcome measures or evaluative methods
  • Funding models

This reading course will contribute to student learning and experience related to:

• Primary, secondary and tertiary information sources used in health and medicine, including grey literature
• Literature search skills
• Types of searches (scoping, narrative, systematic)
• Client engagement
• Service planning, delivery, logging and reporting
• Database management software

Term: Fall, 2012

Interested students should contact Dr. Jacqueline MacDonald: jacqueline.macdonald@dal.ca

I would like to extend my sincerest congratulations to Conrad Ng, a recent MLIS grad, for winning the Best Poster Award at the iConference ’12 in Toronto earlier this month. Conrad’s was presenting a poster called, “From Data to Knowledge: Discovery of Medical Laboratory Demand Patterns Through Visualization Techniques,” The poster depicts the result of a student-led study that Conrad’s conducted in the Fall of 2011 while working as a research assistant at the Social Media Lab and in collaboration with Capital District Health Authority (CDHA).

The study uses data visualization techniques and social network analysis to determine the status and efficiency of laboratory ordering for the outpatient system in Nova Scotia. The goal of this pilot project was to turn the vast amount of data in the CDHA’s laboratory information system into usable information and to allow the CDHA to identify usage trends to better understand the future demands on lab testing and allow policymakers more insight into the Nova Scotia primary care landscape.

This initiative was done in partnership with Dr. Calvino Cheng at CDHA and was funded by Mitacs and CDHA.

The YA Hotline is going digital!  The YA Hotline, one of the oldest YA journals in the world, is celebrating its 35^th anniversary with a dramatic change of format.  It is now available online FREE OF CHARGE at http://ocs.library.dal.ca/ojs/index.php/YAHS.  Twenty back issues (dating to 2005) have been archived and we will soon be publishing our first original digital issue, number 94, Teens and Technology.

Since 1977, the YA Hotline has been researched, written and produced by Dalhousie School of Information Management students enrolled in INFO 6250: Services and Resources for Young Adults.   The newsletter contains a large amount of information and resources for both young adults and young adult librarians including book reviews, resource lists, bibliographies, feature articles, interviews and more.  Each issue explores a different theme of interest to teens and practitioners in school and public libraries.

In keeping with the Hotline`s history as student-produced, this new initiative arose as a student project in Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd`s Digital Libraries class in the fall of 2011.  MLIS students Melissa Scanlan, Ashley Enman, and Jasmine MacDonald worked with Geoff Brown of the Killam Library to move the YA Hotline into a digital format.

Print copies of the YA Hotline will still be sent to paid subscribers, but no new paid subscriptions are being accepted.  We hope that making the YA Hotline freely available online will attract a whole new audience of readers and YA librarians to this excellent resource.

Questions and comments can be sent to Vivian Howard, Editor, at howardv@dal.ca.