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• Director's CorNER
  
  
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• Inside Outreach
  
  
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• Lessons Learned
  
  
• Announcements
  
  
• Links
  
  

An important article on the subject of outreach by Carol Sherrer from the University of Illinois at Chicago was published in the July, 2002 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association. Unlike most "how we done it good articles", Carol provides an accurate account of lessons learned from a project that was not successful. Her premise is that the traditional models for providing outreach to health professionals in rural areas and to health professionals practicing in community based HIV/AIDS clinics that have been so successful in the past, do not translate well to outreach to community-based agencies or volunteer organizations.

What is the traditional model for providing outreach to health professionals? There are four characteristics:

A fifth characteristic emphasizing the importance of a liaison at each site grew out of the outreach model for HIV/AIDS clinics.

Carol's article discusses in detail how following this model did not work in her experience with providing outreach to environmental health community based groups in Chicago. So if this is not the model for providing outreach to these groups, what is the model?

My own experience in Chicago and Massachusetts suggests the following:

1. De-emphasize the computer. Since many of the organizations are run by volunteers, and funding fluctuates, the groups can not always guarantee the computer will be used for access to NLM services and products. Sometimes we use the computer as the "carrot" to entice groups to participate in our project. In the end this backfires, because once the computer is acquired, sometimes excuses are made to not attend training. In one of our outreach projects in Massachusetts, we provide a laptop to a church which runs a health clinic two nights a week. They lock the computer up in a secure location when the clinic is not in service.

2. Do not require people to come to traditional classroom training. Training needs to take place at the sites in small snippets; 20 minutes at a time. Busy health professionals do not have the time, with the change in health care reimbursement today, to travel to training or the financial incentive to cancel patient visits to attend a class. Volunteers sometimes do not have a mode of transportation to attend training classes at the university medical library. If training is done in groups, consider reimbursing participants for travel and babysitting services.

3. Emphasize the development of personal relationships between the library project personnel and project participants. This requires repeated contact over a long period of time.

4. Rethink our assumptions of a well-thought out budget for a winning, sustainable grant proposal. In the past, we have assumed that we should divide the budget amongst the participants in an effort to ensure equal collaboration and commitment between the sites and the library; and that too much money in support of project personnel showed lack of ability to sustain the project post-funding. I think we need to focus our efforts on funding personnel in order to develop the lasting relationships needed to ensure project success.

5. Acknowledge the fact that outreach to community based groups is different than outreach to health professionals, a patron group we are familiar with in serving at our own libraries. We need to develop and provide training for librarians on how to provide this kind of outreach. Involve health educators, public health workers, etc. in library outreach projects to community groups. We can learn from them. The article in this newsletter by Barbara Winrich, a health educator on the Lamar Soutter Library staff, is a good example of what we need to consider when providing outreach to special populations in the community. We need to exchange more lessons from the field.

Finding the best model for providing outreach to community based organizations and special populations is the RML's challenge for this contract period. We'd love to hear from you on what has worked and what hasn't.

Elaine Martin, Director