Library and Information Centre

Annual Report

2014(1st April 2014 to 31st March 2015)

Library and Information Centre

West Suffolk Hospital Foundation Trust

Hardwick Lane

Bury St Edmunds

Suffolk

IP33 2QZ

Tel: 01284 713112

Email:

This report covers the period 1st April 2014 to 31st March 2015.

The Library and Information Centre is referred to as the Library throughout this report. The West Suffolk Foundation Trust is referred to as WSFT.

Under section 1.2 of the annual Library Quality Assurance Framework we are required to produce a formally documented annual review which includes all of the following elements:

  • Highlights service developments
  • Outlines customer activity
  • Evaluates and reflects upon the activity during the year to inform future actions
  • Highlights positive impact on the organisation
  • Highlights future actions from the review

This annual report was approved by the Education Strategy Committee on 17th June 2015.

Current Library staff:

Lynette Last – Trust Librarian 0.73 WTE (retiring March 2015 and returning as 0.47 in April 2014)

Laura Wilkes – Trust Librarian 0.74 WTE (increasing to 0.75 from May 2015)

Beverley Walsh – Assistant Librarian 1.00 WTE

James Allen – Library Technician 0.93 WTE

Jan Skillen – Library Assistant 0.44 WTE

Total WTE: 384

The Library is staffed for 46 hours over 5 days, Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm. Access is available via proximity card every day between 8am and 10pm.

Stakeholders

The Library is based in the Education Centre at West Suffolk Hospital and serves:

  • All staff employed by the WSFT
  • Nursing students from University Campus Suffolk
  • Cambridge University medical students
  • Social services staff employed by the local authority but based at WSFT
  • Staff employed by Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (mental health) based at Wedgwood House and within the community
  • Staff employed by St Nicholas Hospice
  • Staff working in the community and formerly employed by WSFT but now employed by organisations such as SERCO.
  • A small number of GPs working in the community.
  • A small number of private members.

Current active membership is 1564, averaging 391 per quarter – that is, users who have borrowed items in the last quarter. This would not necessarily include users who have requested articles or training, used the library as a study space, used the library pcs or used our enquiry service. Current registered users are in excess of 3000.

Funding and provision of services

Funding for library services is traditionally divided between Health Education East of England [HEE] via the Learning Development Agreement and WSFT. The Library also has access to some WSFT charitable funds.

Annual Library Quality Assurance Framework (LQAF)

The LQAF is the clearest way to demonstrate how library services have developed and improved during 2014/15.

There are 47 criteria which require some level of compliance within the LQAF. The scoring categories are Fully Compliant (FC), Partial Compliance (PC) and Non Compliant (NC). Some criteria were previously deemed Non Applicable (NA) to health libraries.

The national target is to achieve full compliance with 90% of the applicable criteria and a green RAG rating.

2013 - 2014

As a result of our high score in 2013 (98%) we were advised that in 2014 we would only be required to submit evidence of improvement on a smaller selection of core criteria, criteria for which we were partially compliant, or on innovation, which would have enabled us to implement some of the developments that we had begun in previous years.

However, at a regional Health Libraries Meeting in June 2014 it became apparent that some library managers were under the impression that all criteria had to be covered in 2014.

In addition, for the first time, a robust system of verification was established and the criteria within the LQAF were more strictly applied than in previous years, (for example, acting on advice from our former regional library lead, we had not previously submitted evidence for section 5.3l relating to provision of library services for patients and the public as we had been advised that this was not applicable).

New advice was given indicating that these criteria were now applicable and that evidence needed to be submitted. The submission date was also moved from September 2014 to July 2014.

The result was that we were scored as partially compliant for criteria that had been previously scored as fully compliant and our overall result for full compliance in 2014 dropped to 94%. This is still above the national target of 90%.

See Appendix 1 for the peer review form and LQAF Report 2014.

Deliver for Today

  1. Service Developments
  • In recognition of the quality of our training skills, we were commissioned by the Trust to deliver three new Skills Plus courses covering Medical Terminology, Writing for Publication and Presentations and Copyright.
  • We bid successfully for funding from the Co-Medical Education and Training Committee to purchase a lifetime subscription to Anatomy TV.
  • James Allen achieved the ACLIP qualification in January 2015.
  • In the national Sally Hernando Innovation Awards linked to the LQAF, Laura Wilkes was awarded the runners-up award in the Marketing category for using her role as the Innovation Scout as an innovative way to market library services, and James Allen and Beverley Walsh achieved Certificates of Recognition for the Projects Database and the Medical Terminology course respectively.
  • In response to partial compliance in the LQAF for provision of information for patients and/or the public, we instigated a series of scheduled displays around various health awareness days/events and we have incorporated this into our marketing action plan.
  • In response to partial compliance in the LQAF for our marketing strategy we are implementing a new marketing strategy and action plan.
  • Health Management and Innovation Update (HMIU) has been reformatted, after feedback, to map to the Together strategic framework.
  • Netvibes – in response to feedback we have created a Netvibes current awareness page with RSS feeds from all of our regional e-journals and we have created a separate Netvibes page for the Paediatrics department.
  1. Customer Activity

Our customer activity is represented graphically in appendix 2 with supporting explanations.

See Appendix 2 for evidence of our customer activity.

Invest in Quality, Staff and Clinical Leadership

  1. Evaluation of activity and changes in staffing levels

During 2014 three members of staff retired and some adjustments were made to the WTE of the remaining staff. The WTE cover has reduced from 3.84 to 3.59. A further reduction of 0.91 WTE is expected in the next 18 months.

There are several issues to address, and these were considered in light of our Action Plan, which sets out how we will deliver our strategic goals. The issues are:

  • Can we continue to deliver our current services with reduced staff cover?
  • Do we need to change our focus from time-intensive activities, such an information skills training, to a greater emphasis on time-saving services for staff?
  • How do we address the on-going issues with technical difficulties and access arrangements for national and regional e-resources when they are outside our circle of influence? How do we lessen the negative impact on our users?
  • If we reduce the amount of time spent on training, can we meet the expected increased demand for more tailored services, such as literature searches and tailored alerting services?
  • An increase in virtual services requires a more technically proficient workforce – do we have the right skills?

We set about gathering the evidence to answer these questions by doing the following:

  • A skill mix review and SWOT analysis, mapped to current service provision, was carried out in January 2015
  • A further PEST and SWOT analysis of our current services was carried out in February 2015.
  • One of the main tasks carried out by Ginny Dale was chasing overdue books and outstanding fines, which is time-consuming and labour-intensive. We therefore carried out a costing exercise to determine the cost of chasing overdue books and outstanding fines each year, an informal survey of our users and sought feedback from our stakeholder group, the Library Users’ Panel, on three issues:

Does charging fines on overdue library books encourage or discourage return of books?

Would suspension of library services, after four overdue reminders, be a fairer sanction?

How do you feel about using e-books?

  • Informal feedback will also be sought from Paediatrics and other specific departments throughout 2015 and a business case prepared to utilise some limited band 5 funding to provide a development opportunity, in the form of a pilot Clinical Librarian service, for the Assistant Librarian in preparation for effective succession planning
  • A library survey will be carried out in June 2015
  • Following the success of the new Skills Plus courses, a costings exercise and a training needs analysis will be carried out in 2015 to inform the development of new and existing courses

Build a Joined-Up Future

  1. Positive impact on the Trust
  • Consistency and a high level of book loans in comparison to other regional library services would indicate that we are making accurate and relevant purchasing decisions, however our loans have undergone a slight decline which may indicate users are seeking information elsewhere, such as online. We will address this issue in our annual library survey in June.
  • Purchase of Anatomy TV under a lifetime subscription will ensure students across many specialities have access to high quality anatomical animations, and early usage figures are very encouraging
  • Promotion and activities of the Innovation Scout role alongside library functions resulted in three certificates of recognition in the Sally Hernando Innovation Awards in 2014 and the staging of the first Enter the Dragons event in March 2015, raising the profile of WSFT as an innovative trust
  • As a result of the national award, Laura Wilkes was invited to speak at the University Health and Medical Libraries Spring Conference in March 2015
  • Continued provision of high quality training and literature searches supports clinical decision-making, practice development, education and staff development within the Trust
  • Our track record of delivering relevant and effective information skills training is reflected in the commissioning of three new Skills Plus courses and supports diversification of library services to meet staff needs
  • Development of a new Medical Terminology course led to an invitation to deliver the course at two locations outside of the region, thus enhancing the reputation of the Trust as an innovative training centre
  • Professionalisation of the library service, with the acquisition of ACLIP, MCLIP and Revalidation certification, ensures trust staff have access to information professionals, committed to continuing professional development.
  • Our continuing role in the LQAF verification process, peer reviewing other regional library services, ensures we are aware of best practice and informs and improves our own compliance with the LQAF.

See Appendix 3 for impact statements

  1. Future actions

Training

Analysis of the evidence gathered to date is still on going, but initial findings suggest we will change our emphasis from training in information skills (this service will still be available) to carrying out more literature searches across a wider range of staff and providing tailor-made and relevant alerting services. We believe this will

  • have a more positive impact on staff learning and research
  • make the evidence base more accessible
  • save staff time, enabling them to deliver the best quality and safest care for our community

Training levels have evened out and become stable over the past few years, so it may be possible to concentrate on delivering group training on new topics. However, we will continue to monitor this area as it is anticipated that student levels for medicine, nursing and paramedics will increase over the next 12 months, which may lead to an increased demand for information skills training. We will continue to respond to local need.

We will evaluate the impact of the new Skills Plus courses.

Overdue fines

We will cease charging fines on overdue items and move to a system of reminders leading, eventually, to suspension of library services for persistent offenders. We will continue to instruct Finance to recover unreturned items. We will monitor this change over the next 12 months and evaluate its impact, but it is anticipated that it will save staff time and costs, thus allowing more time to be spent on improving services.

Staffing levels

We will continue to monitor the impact of reduced staffing levels on service provision and continue to propose effective succession planning.

R&D

In line with section 6 of our Action Plan, to work with R&D to help them develop a strategy in line with the strategic objectives of the Together framework and aligned to our own strategy which is due for renewal in 2016, and to support them in the implementation of those objectives by continued presence at ROC meetings and literature reviews for proposed research studies.

  1. Marketing

Our marketing and promotional activities are outlined in our marketing policy, specifically our Marketing Action Plan.

See Appendix 4

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