EBM Survey Results

Last year, we surveyed practicing medical librarians related to their roles in supporting and enhancing evidence-based medicine (EBM) practice and here are the preliminary results on the 11 multiple choice questions. We got a total of 596 valid responses to the survey questions with 51 % coming from hospital libraries, 42% from academic libraries, and 7% from special libraries. Some survey result highlights:

• The most frequently reported role is to provide EBM research to users, followed by teaching EBM, and contributing to EBM initiatives in their institutions.
• Hospital librarians are most active in providing EBM research.
• Academic librarians are most active in teaching EBM.
• Attending journal clubs, morning reports, and medical rounds is not a popular responsibility among medical librarians.

The survey results were presented at the Canadian Association of Information Science (CAIS) 2009 Conference and published in the conference proceedings. Here is the presentation:

Exploring the Real World: Medical Librarians' Involvement in Supporting EBM Practice

View more Microsoft Word documents from lwu5.

Our next step will be looking into librarians' comments to get some idea about what they really thought about their EBM roles.