The Effect of Clinical Librarian Services on Improving Medical Students’ Access to Health Information: Iranian Experience

For physicians, choosing the correct and up-to-date health information is one of the most important challenges. Therefore, they need to acquire information retrieval skills. The present study examines clinical librarian's educational role in improving medical students’ accessing health information skills. This study is a quasi-experimental applied survey. The study participants were senior medical students of BPUMS1 taking the clinical course in 2013 (n=52). They were divided into two groups, test and control groups, each containing 21 (test group) and 23 (control group). Subsequently, a two-month workshop program besides training sessions was held with the participation of a clinical librarian at the clinic and a scenario by a physician present in the test group. The data collection tool was a self-administered questionnaire used before and after intervention (two months later) to both test and control groups. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and an independent T-Test. The findings of this study show that, in total, there is an increase in mean scores of familiarity with medical databases, their use, and the need for clinical librarian services after an educational intervention. This increase was revealed in (37.33 ± 9.61), (36.85 ± 10.1), and (42.85 ± 3.5) respectively; and the difference was significant (p<0.001). The lack of use of updated medical evidence and resources by medical students was due to the lack of knowledge of specialized medical databases. One of the useful strategies in this regard is the inclusion of clinical librarians in the treatment teams and different hospital units.