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.
The library team (all three of us) have predominantly worked from home since that date. We are fortunate that as ours is a community Trust, the IT team were already well set up to enable remote working, and we were set up with laptops and full network access in a very short timeframe. Ryan has been popping into the library a couple of times a week for the duration of the pandemic to sort the post / respond to book requests etc, and this presence has been increasing of late as new clinical teams have moved into Stockdale House.
In the early days of the pandemic, the library space was used for storing goodies to be shared with clinical staff – such as the McVities cakes in the photo below. Sadly, the library staff weren’t around at the time to benefit from any of these!
In March 2020, the team set up a daily COVID-19 digest, which was distributed to over 200 staff, both in LCH, but also in primary care, the CCG, hospices, and Leeds City Council.
Along with LTHT colleagues, we supported GOLD Command with their Intelligence Briefings – this was a very demanding, and time sensitive piece of work, that really benefitted from cross organisational work, both for capacity, and maintaining sanity!
Our Stockdale House Book Club went virtual, and it became available to all LCH staff. It even won a prize at the YOHHLNet Christmas Study day
With the advent of MS Teams, we moved our training offer online, sharing our experiences with other NHS library colleagues in Leeds, and then wider with YOHHLNet colleagues.
Through March and May 2021, we have rolled out nine half-hour training sessions on “easy access to journal articles”, specifically featuring LibKey Nomad and BrowZine. With over 150 bookings, these bite-size sessions have been incredibly popular, and we anticipate an associated increased in electronic journal usage as a result. We are providing further information about this at the Northern Operational Group meeting on 8th July.
Within LCH, the team now have active involvement in the Clinical & Corporate Policies Group, Quality Forum, Learning & Development Group and also the new Quality Assurance & Improvement Group.
We have now added details of all staff publications onto the library catalogue, and these can be found here. This is one part of the knowledge mobilisation work that we are getting involved – all part of #LCHlearns.
We continue to have very active Twitter account – follow us at @LCH_Library. We were recently very pleased to be able to share the following impact quote from our Chief Executive
Helen Swales
Library Services Manager
Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust
May 2021
