On Wednesday, March 27, 2013, a meeting of the NN/LM PSR Regional Advisory Committee (RAC) was convened at the UCLA Faculty Center. The committee had not met as a large group for several years, so the membership was completely reconstituted and revitalized! Fifteen committee members, representing the constituencies served by the RML, attended the meeting, along with RML staff. Composition of the committee includes health professionals, hospital librarians, academic librarians, school and public librarians, community college librarians, community health librarians, and community-based organization representatives. A complete list of RAC members, along with minutes and presentation slides of the 3/27/13 meeting, are available on the NN/LM PSR web site. (more…)

PSR was invited to participate at the California School Nurses Organization Conference in early February in San Diego. Kay Deeney taught an extensive workshop focusing on MedlinePlus and other NLM resources. She covered the NLM Drug Portal, the Pillbox, DailyMed and Genetics Home Reference. Topics on evaluating health websites and writing easy to read materials were also covered. The school nurses who attended appreciated learning about these resources. (more…)

by Yamila El-Khayat, MALS
Outreach Services Librarian, Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

Kay Deeney and I recently had the opportunity to attend the 10th Annual Promotoras and Community Health Workers Conference, held December 7-8, 2012, in Los Angeles. This annual meeting is sponsored by the National Network to Eliminate Disparities in Behavioral Health (NNED). (more…)

by Yamila El-Khayat, MALS
Outreach Services Librarian,
Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region exhibited National Library of Medicine resources at the 69th Annual Convention & Marketplace of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Sacramento, CA, October 23-25, 2012. Staffing was provided by Kay Deeney, NN/LM PSR Educational Services Coordinator, and Yamila El-Khayat, Outreach Services Librarian at the Arizona Health Sciences Library. They were ably assisted by several local Network volunteers; including Suzanne Beattie, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Roseville; Alison Clement, Marshall Medical Center Community Health Library, Placerville; Ana Macias, Kaiser Permanente Sacramento Valley Area; and Margaret (Peggy) Makie, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Sacramento. All volunteers did a wonderful job to disseminate the information about NLM’s health resources! The NCAI meeting was an important event, bringing together a large group of people, representing many different American Indian tribes from across the nation, along with Alaska Native tribes. (more…)

by Yamila El-Khayat, MALS
Outreach Services Librarian, Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

Tucson hosted its seventh annual “Vida” Conference on October 6, 2012, at Apollo Middle School, located in the southern part of Tucson, with a population consisting of roughly 83% Mexican-American and 10% Native American residents. This conference was held in this area because its primary goal is to provide bilingual breast cancer education to the minority community of southern Arizona. (more…)

During my spring 2012 internship, I took on a variety of projects at NN/LM PSR. One of these projects included making modifications to the existing Helping Older Adults Search for Health Information Online: A Toolkit for Trainers to create a toolkit targeting adults, especially those with low literacy skills. (more…)

by Lynn Kysh
Department of Information Studies student
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

During the 2012 spring quarter, I had the opportunity to intern with the Pacific Southwest Regional Medical Library. For the past ten weeks, I’ve taken on three projects: a training session on MedlinePlus for medical social workers, a webinar focused on resources for sexual violence survivors, and a project modifying an existing curriculum, which instructs senior adults how to find and evaluate online health resources for a low literacy population. These projects all complement my interest in providing instruction services, and my growing commitment to health literacy. (more…)

by Patricia Vader and Frances Chu
Harriet K. & Philip Pumerantz Library, Western University of Health Sciences
Pomona, CA

Pumerantz Library at Western University of Health Sciences received an outreach funding award in August 2011, to plan and implement a diabetes information outreach program to the Hispanic community of Pomona, located roughly 30 miles east of Los Angeles. This resulted in a pilot program to teach the community members about a range of topics related to diabetes, and how to use MedlinePlus to find information related to the health issues associated with diabetes. (more…)

by Stephen Kiyoi, Second Year NLM Associate Fellow
NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

During the month of April, 2012, the RML offered a newly developed training series targeting community college librarians. The series, entitled Navigating the Health Information Maze, was offered in a set of four, one-hour webcasts every Tuesday during the month. Twenty-nine librarians from 24 different institutions took advantage of the opportunity to gain expertise in National Library of Medicine resources; including PubMed, MedlinePlus, the NLM Gallery of Mobile Apps and Sites, and Health Information for Special Populations. Additional information about the series and archived training sessions are available from the preceding series website. Outreach to community colleges is a major NN/LM initiative for the coming year. (more…)

by Naomi C. Broering, MLS, MA, AHIP; Gregory A. Chauncey, MBA; Stacy Gomes, PhD.
Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, San Diego, CA

The Pacific College of Oriental Medicine’s (PCOM) Library received Major Outreach Award funding from the RML in 2009, for an 18-month project that ended in April 2011. The overall project goal was to promote easy-to-use Web informatics access to NLM and NIH online health information resources for consumers and health professionals. This gargantuan, but fun task involved networking and collaborating with an eight-member team of San Diego public libraries, faith-based organizations, a community center, and affiliated clinics, to implement an instructional program with a variety of teaching alternatives targeting an ethnically diverse community. We taught hands-on workshops, developed electronic tutorials, held live web-based sessions that were videotaped, produced DVDs, and conducted a series of Webinars for health care practitioners. In addition, we made web page enhancements, such as adding an A to Z database arrangement, new online tutorials of PubMed and MedlinePlus, and implementation of Web 2.0 features used for instructional training of NLM resources. Examples of links for tutorials and databases are on the PCOM web site. It was an ambitious project, but extremely rewarding! (more…)