In March 2020 when the impact of the pandemic was starting to become clear, the Library and Knowledge Services at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust closed the physical library space and the team began to work from home. Many of the services we were running were carrying on as before; with the Trust being spread over a large geographical area we’d been delivering some services virtually or remotely for a long time.…

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Part II: When I was designing the slides, I wanted the session to be interactive, engaging, and informative. I asked the audience where they got their health information, with the consensus being…

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On 29th June 2022, Yorkshire and Humber Health Libraries Network (YOHHLNet) held its first face to face event for over two and a half years. The study day (held at Leeds Central Library) incorporated the AGM and brought around 30 people from across the region together. The event booked up really quickly, even before the agenda had been finalised, showing the keenness of many to meet face to face again.…

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I joined the team at North Cumbria Integrated Care in June 2021 as a Knowledge Support Officer. My previous experience as a Librarian was in schools where all teaching and learning was face to face in a pre-COVID world; suddenly the information landscape looked very different! In this new, virtual world enhancing my own digital skills in order to provide quality training and support was my immediate challenge. Research and networking being my top priority. New training tools and techniques proved to be an exciting opportunity for me and I was soon keen to share these new platforms and strategies with colleagues.…

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As a newcomer to health libraries, I wanted to immerse myself into the knowledge management landscape. Health literacy as a concept was something I was drawn to because of my interest in information and digital literacy. Kieran Lamb my library manager put me in touch with Siobhan Lyndsey due to her expertise in this area. We organised a team’s meeting and had a great discussion on the tenets and pedagogy of health literacy. Siobhan was kind enough to share some slides she created for a health literacy training session which formed the blueprint for my session.…

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Last year we acquired a new resource called Anatomy TV. We wanted to raise awareness of this new resource and encourage usage so we devised a marketing plan to help us do this. We decided to focus on what the user could achieve by using this resource, rather than just simply telling them they have access to it. The message we wanted to convey was “Improve your knowledge of anatomy”. We thought this would appeal to staff wanting to update their existing knowledge and also to students needing to learn anatomy for their studies.…

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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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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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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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