As KNOWvember comes into view once more, here at Pennine Care we have been reflecting on our activities for 2022. The theme last year was breaking down the barriers to mobilising knowledge in the NHS. We used the Knowledge Management tool to examine those barriers and review what steps we could take to overcome them…
‘Wag & Company’, a charity which provides animal assisted therapy to older people, was launched in May 2016. The Charity matches and enables professionally assessed volunteers and their dogs, known as ‘Visiting Wag Teams’, to safely offer one to two hour visits per week to older people in a variety of different settings across the North East region. The initiative to investigate the benefits of pet therapy at North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust first came from a ward based therapy team working on the elderly care unit to help patients with dementia. Information gathered from the wider literature revealed evidence to support the benefits of ‘Animal Assisted Therapy’ in helping to reduce anxiety, improve physical health, cognitive function and overall health and well-being.…
I hope it is not a generalisation to say that librarians are usually quite introspective people. Moreover, those of us who have completed a librarianship qualification or chartership will almost certainly be familiar with the concept of “being a reflective practitioner”. As a result, it can be said that libraries and teaching reflective practice go hand-in-hand. Reflection is something that healthcare professionals are regularly encouraged to do. For example, nurses are expected to submit reflections as part of their revalidation every three years. However, after doing some enquiring, it turns out that they receive very little training on how to write reflections effectively. I theorised that this was a potential gap that the library services could fill. I also felt that designing and delivering my own training session would be an excellent learning opportunity. I thought it could be useful to share my reflections on designing the session and the feedback I received for those interested in developing something similar.…
The International Clinical Librarian Conference took place on the 3rd and 4th October at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. The event was a chance for clinical and outreach librarians from…
