Prior to the pandemic the library at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Trust produced a monthly newsletter of about four pages with information on library resources, outreach and staff news. The newsletter goes out to several hundred staff; recipients generally sign up to receive it when they join the library. Once we entered the first lockdown the library staff were working from home and it was decided the library news should be fortnightly to keep users informed about the latest service developments. We had been taking it in turns to edit the newsletter but I volunteered to become the sole editor.…

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I’d like to thank you for invitation to contribute a piece to Northern Lights on my role within the Health Education Knowledge and Library Services Team. It provides me with an opportunity to stop and reflect on my new relatively new role as Deputy Head of Knowledge and Library Services.…

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In April 2020, the Leeds Community Healthcare (LCH) library team were asked to support the Weekly Health and Social Care Intelligence Reports that were being pulled together by Health and Care Evaluation Service (NHS Leeds CCG) and the Leeds Health Partnership Team (Leeds City Council).…

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In common with services everywhere, the service we have been able to provide over the past year has been coloured by the Trust’s response to COVID-19 and the guidance around that. The physical service was provided from the Library & Evidence Research Centre at Leeds General Infirmary, with staff coming into LGI on a rota to maintain safe minimal staffing, and working from home the rest of the time. We managed to maintain five-day opening for much of the year, but dropped to three days for March and April 2021, and are now back up to four days a week. Alongside the physical service we promoted electronic access, continued to deliver our literature search and enquiry services, and moved training over to remote delivery.…

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Digging up an old management textbook may not seem the most productive thing to do with your spare time, but Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ 1994 best-seller “Built to last: successful habits of visionary companies” might just buck the trend.…

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In March 2020, Greater Manchester Mental Health Library and Knowledge Service began operating a purely virtual service as a result of the pandemic and lockdown.…

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No one can deny the devastating impact of COVID-19, and the effect this has had on the NHS. The library environment has adapted with the introduction of sanitation stations and the installation of screens and individual pods. Where possible, services have become virtual and social media has become a vehicle for communication and engagement with colleagues.…

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Since September here at the PHRC we have continued to work collaboratively within our team and the wider Public Health workforce in Leeds to carry on delivering as much of our service as possible whilst keeping our library closed to visitors. Since you last heard from us Sally and Sadaf have been in the Resource Centre both together and separately as restrictions evolved and changed. We’ve certainly noticed a steady increase in enquiries and collections of resources, including most recently health models which we’re really pleased to be loaning out again. Our team continues to facilitate, and plan Want to Know More About sessions several times a month. WTKMA webinars have been incredibly popular, made all the more so by being recorded and available after the original ‘live’ session. We’ve had webinars on the Covid-19 vaccine, bereavement, child safety and physical activity to name a few and we have plenty more coming up, they’re included in this playlist https://bit.ly/LPHTfilms…

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The library space, along with the rest of the 2nd floor at Stockdale House (our Trust HQ) was officially opened in March 2020 – one week before everyone get sent to work from home. We had at least benefitted from the summer 2019 refurb for several months before lockdown occurred.…

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Once we’d got LibKey Nomad installed on all laptops and PCs across the Trust, we identified there was a gap that needed to be filled. If someone was searching on Google Scholar and we didn’t have a subscription to a particular journal, LibKey Nomad would flag it up with an ‘Access Options’ button. This button would lead the library user to a page where they were advised we didn’t have a current subscription and the user hit the proverbial dead end. We knew we had to provide a solution, in order to fulfil our commitment to seamless access to our resources.…

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