2020 has been a difficult year for the Library at Blackpool, with 2 members of staff (including the Manager) on long term sick leave since June 2019 and of course the COVID-19 Pandemic. However, it has not diminished our attempts to provide service to our patrons, the Trust and Education Centre. The year of 2020 saw the Library actively involved in a number of initiatives and developments including the running of a Staff Crèche, preparing and packing Gift Packs for “first-line staff as part of the Blue Skies Charity Office and being involved in NHS promotions. We also in December 2020 welcomed our new LKS Manager Linda Kalinda.…

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In March this year, a long established senior library assistant in my team is due to retire. We are a Trust in financial special measures, the site libraries in our Trust only have the capacity to hold one staff member behind the counter areas and ensure social distancing. The question is, how am I going to induct and train a new staff member if there can only be one person on site at any one time?…

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During 2020 many LKS staff across the North rapidly mobilised into a variety of roles across their organisations to support the response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. In the second of 2 articles, 9 of these staff reflect upon their experiences and share their advice for anyone considering redeployment.…

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The article below is the first of two in which LKS staff from across the north reflect upon their redeployment experiences. “I went in as ops manager and have never done that before and [it] wasn’t library related. We looked after the whole patient journey from an admin point of view from admission, discharge, and the patient flow.” Steve Glover: redeployed as Duty Ops Manager, NHS Nightingale North West…

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Organising accommodation bookings for the hospital, coordinating, and distributing donations, operating a COVID-19 hotline, screening staff and patients on arrival to protect those at high risk, fit mask testing, working in the Nightingale hospital, or supporting staff welfare efforts managing bids to improve staff spaces were some of the roles our library and knowledge service (LKS) colleagues from across the North took on in 2020.…

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In the year 2000, thankfully, we all survived the ‘millennium bug’ that was going to see off Y2K (as it was called).  The World Wide Web was about 10 years old and becoming known as the internet; Internet Explorer was about to launch as version 6.…

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I started working in the Jefferson Library at what was then Central Manchester & Manchester Children’s Hospitals (CMMC), in May of 2005, I was employed as a part-time Library Assistant, and this was my first experience of working in a library, let alone a health library. I came from the world of import/export and dealing with TV infomercials, so this was very different!…

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I was asked to contribute a personal reflection of the role of clinical librarian over the last 20 years, with a nod towards possible future developments, and whilst it’s true I have been working as a health librarian in the NHS for two decades, clinical librarianship was not a feature of my early NHS career. I don’t pretend to be a historian of all matter clinical librarian-y, so instead I’ll comment on the things which made an impression on me during the first decade, led me towards taking up a clinical librarian role myself in the second, and what I hope will happen in the future.…

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Reflecting on the last twenty years, has been interesting and surprising when I realise just how much has changed for northwest health libraries.…

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I started my professional library career with a two year stint at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, before moving to work at Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI) in 1996. I was fortunate to have Ian King as my manager at BRI, and even though I was only in that post for two years, he taught me a huge amount about health libraries (although memories of his “filing system” still make me shudder!)…

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