This hands-on course will describe why it is important to evaluate health websites. Participants will be given criteria for how to evaluate health information on the Internet.

This interactive seminar focuses on ways medical librarians can become more involved in the patient safety processes and activities within their institutions and organizations. Topics include understanding the issues of patient safety; locating where patient safety practices exist within the institution; and identifying patient safety resources for health professionals, for administration and staff, and for patients and families. Focused for hospital librarians, these four hours of lecture, discussion and brainstorming help librarians become effective agents for improving patient safety.

The purpose of this course is to expand awareness of valuable Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) resources among medical librarians. Health and medical staff librarians will find HCUP useful when assisting researchers with securing reliable healthcare information. Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, HCUP captures information on 90 percent of all hospital stays in the U.S., and is the largest collection of multi-year, all-payer, encounter-level data available to researchers. It is a family of databases, software tools, and products that enable health services research and policy analysis focusing on hospital, ambulatory surgery and emergency department encounters. HCUP data support cutting-edge health services research and policy analyses. To date, HCUP data have been used in over 800 research articles published in prestigious journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Economics, and Health Services Research. HCUP data also support congressionally mandated reports, such as the National Healthcare Disparities Report and the National Healthcare Quality Report. This course will provide participants with an in-depth introduction to HCUP as well as a hands-on demonstration of the HCUP free on-line data querying tool, HCUPnet. Course participants will receive a CD containing valuable resources that expand on topics covered in the session, data file descriptions, research examples that use HCUP data, information on how to access documentation, and instructions on how to obtain HCUP data and tools.

The workshop is comprised of small group meetings and plenary sessions with individual study time daily. Each small group is participant-driven, so there is no set agenda for the small groups. Plenary sessions are decided in mid-summer, and will be modified on-site if participants request particular subjects. Participants are divided into their small groups based on both experience and interenst area and remain with the same group throughout the workshop. Workshop will take place August 6-10, 2006 at VAil Marriott Mountain Resort & Spa, Vail CO.

Clinicians are drowning in a sea of medical information. Clinicians’ information needs are setting-dependent, but librarians have traditionally focused on supplying comprehensive retrieval of citations. The gap between what clinicians want and what librarians provide is becoming more evident in modern practice. To close this gap, clinicians and librarians must come together under the umbrella of information mastery to find and incorporate the best information based on the "Usefulness of Medical Information Equation". This equation stresses evaluating information for a balance between three concepts: validity, relevance and the time it takes to find an answer. Librarians’ abilities to evaluate resources and search effectively are the essential basis of information retrieval, but new skills are necessary to optimize the provision of the right information, at the right time and situation. This class will analyze clinical information needs and participants will learn new skills, and investigate new tools and resources designed to meet them.

Health literacy, as defined by the Institute of Medicine in 2004, is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic information and services needed to make appropriate decisions regarding their health. Communication is essential for the effective delivery of health care; unfortunately, there is often a mismatch between a clinician's level of communication and a patient's level of comprehension. The need for today's patients to be "health literate" is greater than ever due to increasingly complex medical care. The presentation will enable participates to: 1. Define the scope of the health literacy problem and its consequences for the health care system; 2. Recognize health system barriers faced by patients with low literacy; 3. Implement improved methods of verbal and written communication; and 4. Incorporate practical strategies to create a shame-free environment for patients.

This class will take you through the mechanics of how to organize all the pieces of a project and what to do with them in order to produce a professional poster. Students will dissect poster examples into component parts which will be analyzed. Students will learn basic design principles, and appropriate use of fonts/type, and color through interactive exercises. They will be able to evaluate the suitability of images, logos and graphs to be used in their poster creation. Based on the knowledge that they have learned in the class, the students, as a group, will suggest various design options in order to create a poster in a design layout software program as the final project of the course. (Currently this is not designed as a hands-on course).

This course, taught by Regional Medical Library staff, is designed to bring educational opportunities about NLM and NN/LM systems and services to local or sub-regional groups. The course will review and update participants' knowledge of DOCLINE; Linkout; MedlinePlus, PubMed; other NLM programs, systems, and databases; and NLM and NN/LM grants and awards. Sharing an educational experience with colleagues from the same geographic area strengthens interpersonal interactions, allows for sharing expertise and experience, and builds partnerships and cooperation. The course will be of variable length, from 1.5 to 6 hours, and of variable content depending on the needs of the local group, what's new at NLM and NN/LM, time available for presentation and facilities.

This course will cover oncology resources and search techniques. Specific examples will be given for locating different levels and types of information for both clinicians and patients. The course will be taught jointly by a consumer health librarian and a research medical librarian. We will use examples from a large variety of free and fee based resources.

The Pharmacology portion of the class will discuss a variety of topics such as how a chemical becomes a marketable drug and the primary uses, common side effects and interesting facts regarding common drug classes. Examples of some drug classes that will be covered: Cardiovascular ("statins", beta-blockers, anticoagulants), Antibiotics (penicillins, quinolones), Central Nervous System (antidepressants, antianxiety, antipsychotics), and Analgesics (opioids, muscle relaxants). The Information Resources section of this course will focus on how to effectively handle questions and find information concerning drugs and their usage. This session will show how to recognize the core query elements of drug identification, chemical classification, pharmacologic actions, therapeutic usage, adverse effects, drug regulation and economics that can comprise a pharmacologic question. A review of print & electronic drug information resources available to Librarians and the general public will identify the strengths and weaknesses of each resource to answer the specific aspects mentioned above.