Our small, rural Medical Library has faced many challenges during its year of service, most of them related to our extreme location. As residents of our area say, "We're not out in the sticks; we're past the sticks!"
Northern Inyo Hospital in Bishop, California, has only 33 beds and serves a rural population of fewer than 15,000 people, spread over many square miles of the Eastern Sierra and the desert. It is at least a four-hour drive from any large hospital, a l ong way to drive to get advanced medical care or healthcare information. Summer and winter, tourists and sportsmen are mixed with local patients at the Hospital. In extreme emergencies, patients are flown to Reno, Nevada or over the Sierra to hospitals in the Central Valley, California.
Our one-room Medical Library originally began as a small collection overseen by a Medical Records Department employee and has developed into a well-used, current collection of core texts, medical and nursing journals, and other resources. It serves a ll types of healthcare personnel, delivering quick reference and research services on a small budget to the medical community. The Hospital administrator is a strong supporter of the Library and acknowledges the need for a professional librarian to be em ployed.
In the last few years, as cooperation among the small rural hospitals in the area has grown, the library has become a resource center for the medical staffs of three small hospitals at Mammoth Lakes (40 miles north), at Lone Pine (45 miles south) plus an emergency medical clinic at Tonopah, Nevada. These are such small institutions that they do not warrant even basic reference collections and must rely on our texts and journals. Using Grateful Med has helped them a great deal, but most requests for i nformation are from physicians and nurses wanting quick answers or needing comprehensive literature searches.
Physicians send patients who need information about their conditions to the Medical Library, and our local public libraries and school also request information for patient education. Sometimes high school science students will work on projects oversee n by hospital laboratory technicians and will rely on the library for support. We supply information by phone, FAX and e-mail and regular mail. The daily Lad Courier carries our literature searches to Lone Pine and Mammoth Lakes.
Thanks to the Internet, things are changing fast! Rural medical librarians don't have to work in isolation, as we did several years ago. Remember when we had to travel to training courses given several hundred miles away even to learn to use MEDLINE?
Now, the whole world is at our fingertips! NLM's PubMed gives access to literature searches for everyone, whether it's an emergency room physician in Tonopah or one of the medical staff in Lone Pine. In our hospital, each day brings word of new medic al Web sites from people passing the library's door. "Have you seen....?" A physician or nurse will say. "Let me show you!" It's exiting, and it looks like we're only beginning to see the benefits of access to the Internet.
So now we have our beautiful mountains, our peaceful valleys....and information, too!