When seeking answers to clinical questions at the point of care, healthcare professionals must locate relevant, concise, highly reliable and synthesized evidence-based information in a very short period of time, e.g., 3-5 minutes. Clinical residents and fellows must not turn to the Web to get quick answers to their clinical questions, yet there isn’t time to turn to literature databases to do a comprehensive literature review and evaluate all of the results. Therefore, acquiring search skills and access to synthesized evidence-based information becomes a critical necessity.

To address this need, biomedical librarians collaborate with the directors of residency and fellows programs to offer workshops. Recent examples are workshops provided to the internal medicine residents at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), the nephrology fellows at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the occupational medicine residents in the Emergency Department at HUP. At these workshops, the librarians introduce authoritative clinical and evidence-based resources such as DynaMed, UpToDate, FirstConsult, Cochrane Library, etc.   The librarians also demonstrate time-saving tips for searching PubMed, such as employing MeSH terms, search tags, and filters such as umbrella reviews to narrow down the results to the most relevant citations.

If you’d like a biomedical librarian to demonstrate these tips in a group workshop or individual consultation, please contact us!