Doctors Still Need the Paper to Help Treat Patients

Librarians often encounter people questioning the need for libraries when “everything is already online.” While a great deal of information is online, there is still a lot out there that isn’t but is still needed to help treat patients. Here is an example where an older article was necessary to help a doctor treat a patient. (Below is a thank you email, the library received one Monday.) Dear Librarians, I requested an obscure article from 1981 on Friday night and received it today – photocopied by hand from a bound volume by your colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. The article has valuable information for the management of a pregnant patient with a rare antibody. It was referenced by a couple of later review articles, but they did not include all of the relevant clinical details that are described in the original paper, and that will be taken into account for our patient’s plan of care. I truly appreciate all of the work that you do to get the requested articles, and that you do it so quickly and seamlessly (from the requestor’s perspective). Thank you especially to your team, and to all of the medical librarians who provide such critical support in an era of exponentially increasing, and sometimes overwhelming, knowledge and publications.      As the doctor mentioned there were articles available on the rare antibody, but they needed this older article with the “relevant clinical details” that wasn’t online to he...
Source: The Krafty Librarian - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs