Tom Roper's Weblog

ICML and EAHIL2017: Wednesday morning

The first day is over, apart from a reception at Trinity College Dublin tonight, so I’ll get my thoughts down on paper before they fade, fragile blooms that they are. There’s an archive and some analytics of the tweets thanks to Symplur at https://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/icmldub/

The conference was opened by Aoife Lawton, Chair of the International Programme Committee, and National Health Service Librarian, Health Service Executive Dublin. She welcomed us, more than 400 delegates from 33 countries. On the theme of Visibility & Vision: the way forward, she described the challenges of health in Ireland, and how library services have set themselves the goal of providing library services to support a Healthy Ireland, the national framework for improving health and well-being. One of her first ports of call was Britain, where she admired our #amilliondecisions campaign. Ireland has its equivalent,  #EvidenceInformedHealthcare. She warned of the dangers of losing professional visibility and vision. She cited the Australian AHLA standards (which I can’t find, an awful lot of their site is behind a paywall) and the new MLA competencies. Are we still talking about the same things we talked about in 2012? And will we be talking about the same things five years hence in 2022? She advised us to consider the mega-trends in society, and consider what the mega trends in our profession might be.

After the EAHIL President,  Maurella Della Seta, had welcomed us, the first keynote speaker, Hamish Sinclair of the Health Research Board spoke. He pointed out how apt it was that we held our conference in our castle. Dublin Castle was, among many things, the record keeping centre of the colonial administration. We no longer keep knowledge in castles and the researchers of the HRB need vast quantities of data. This is a major national asset that needs management, storage and to be accessible. He gave tribute to the information specialists who work at the HRB, including Louise Farragher. Even when they outsource work, they stipulate that an information specialist must be involved in the project. 

Finally, Michelle Kraft (who blogs as KraftyLibrarian and tweets as @krafty) spoke Her theme was Diversity through Disruption. She cited a number of examples of technological change, such as light-bulbs, e-mail, maps, and disappearing jobs such as switchboard operators, newspaper photographers and journalists. She cited a number of examples of libraries and librarians who have innovated, including our very own Caroline de Brun of Public Health England. 

It was a good optimistic presentation, though I have to say I think she both over-stated and over-simplified her case, and possibly underestimated the progress we have made in Irish, British and European library services. For example, I think most of us already knew that our users access our services on mobile devices, and have made the necessary arrangements for them to work on such platforms. 

After coffee, I went to a consumer health session. While it’s not an area I work in directly, it is a priority for our library and knowledge services, and I thought I might hear something to report back. Bob Gann started off, with an engaging talk on Fake news or clean clear knowledge? Quality in consumer digital health. Bob pointed out that we’ve been talking about these questions for twenty years, and took us through British developments.

He took us through some familiar statistics: 80% of people have looked for health information online, 1 in 5 Google searches is about health, there are over 100,000 health websites, there are 165,000 health apps in the Apple App Store. Cancer Research UK found that over half the cancer articles shared on Facebook contained myths or misinformation  Bob quoted, as did others, @muirgray on clean clear knowledge. The Health on the Net Code is now 20 years old . There’s also the NHS Information Standard. The NHS is relaunching its apps library. The Care Quality Commission is starting to inspect digital services, for example fee-based online consultations with GPs – the day I write this, the Health Service Journal reports that the CQC has found  some digital services to be unsafe – a service that charges £20 for a ten minute video consultation was not prescribing safely. We’ve been talking for twenty years, argued Bob- [perhaps longer, I remember Sally Knight of the Lister Hospital in Stevenage arguing for professional input into public health information in the early nineties -TR] . There are problems of scale - too many resources, pace - we can’t keep up with them, a low awareness of quality marks, and information standards aren’t considered to add any value for providers, certifying processes rather than the information itself. But there are developments: the Patient Information Forum’s Perfect Patient Information Journey project,   the NHS’s Behind the Headlines service and the Tinder Foundation's report  (who have now changed that slightly embarrassing name to the Good Things Programme) Health & digital: Reducing inequalities, improving society An evaluation of the Widening Digital Participation programme

With Health Information Week coming up,  what can librarians do

1. Spread awareness of quality marks for consumer health information
2. Spread critical appraisal skills
3. Campaign and network

 

One of the most interesting things he mentioned was that they had done some work to identify those Clinical Commissioning Groups where both digital exclusion and health inequalities are high.

 

Then Caroline de Brun (vide supra) gave an enthusiastic account of work she did for her PhD, The Librarian will see you now. The Salzburg statement on shared decision making  makes no mention of librarians. She worked with public libraries, offering health information workshops, but found funding was frequently cut and the workshops scrapped. I nopted she had recently delivered one in Crawley public library, not far away.  There’s a lot of resources, but considerable divergence and variation, for example in the area of irritable bowel syndrome. Good information can be hard to find, and Caroline noted the distinction between health literacy and health information literacy. Her literature review found a lot on the poor quality of health websites, but no consensus on which evaluation tools to use, and, again, no librarian involvement in the papers. She proposed two solutions, the COCO database, which she's developing in conjunction with TRIP Database's Jon Brassey and the Peripatetic Outreach Librarian.

 

The last presentations in this session was one on a project in Baltimore in the USA on Project SHARE: Building Teenagers' Skills to Advocate for Improved Health and an Australian paper on Developing a Health Literacy Strategy in a healthcare organisation.

 

In questions, taken, as was the case throughout the conference, at the end of the session, Caroline was asked about the difficulties of involving GPs; she found variation. In Tower Hamlets, GPs were very hard to win over; in Manchester, the opposite was the case. In response to another question, Bob quoted Martha Lane Fox, who had called for three things, a focus on priority populations, ubiquitous connectivity, and better digital literacy of NHS staff. 

 

ICML and EAHIL 2017: the return of conference blogging

I haven’t written here for some time, and for even longer on a conference, but since the number of conferences I’ll be going to for the rest of my career is finite, it might be worth reviving the practice.

I’m in Dublin, at the 12th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), held jointly with the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL). I’ve been to one ICML before, the 8th in 2000 in London, and to several EAHIL, most recently to Seville in 2016. The very first ICML took place in London in 1953. My predecessor, from the days when I worked at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the late Molly Raymer, took part, and my immediate predecessor there, Benita Horder, attended later ones, as well as the founding conference of the International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists. See this paper for an account of the first one:

Prime LM. First International Congress on medical librarianship, London, July 20-26, 1953. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1954 Jan;42(1):32-5.
Available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC199671/

See the call for hosts for the 2021 conference, which gives a definitive list of the conferences to date. Sadly the websites for more recent ones have not been maintained or archived. The cobbler’s child...

The conference opens today, but the two days before are dedicated to continuing education courses. On the first day I assisted Shona Kirtley of the EQUATOR Network, Isla Kuhn of Cambridge University,  Rebeca Isabel-Gómez of the Andalusian Health Technology Assessment Agency and Alicia Fátima Gómez Sánchez of Hertfordshire University in running a workshop on the theme Librarians can help address reporting concerns in the biomedical literature, particularly for systematic reviews. Isla provides a far better account than I could on her blog. We hope the slides and supporting material will be on the conference website soon. 

Yesterday was dedicated to catching up with work, and the odd visit to the splendid Chester Beatty library, to Christchurch Cathedral and a small run. I was probably not the first person to search in vain for Jonathan Swift’s memorial in Christchurch (Ubi saeva indignatio), forgetting that he was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral a little way away.