Section Program: Turning Clinical Students into Evidence-Based Clinicians: The Medical Library's Role

This session, presented by the Dental Section in collaboration with EMTS, NAHRS, and the Medical Library Education sections and the Mental Health and Clinical Librarians/EBHC SIGs, explored the efforts of several libraries to integrate EBM instruction by the library into the curricula of their various institutions. The opening speaker was Connie Schardt from Duke University Medical Center where they have a fairly established EBM Curriculum integrated throughout the four years of medical school. Interested readers should also check out their EBM Librarian blog at http://ebmlibrarian.wetpaint.com.

The next presenter was Lauren Maggio who spoke about the experience of Boston University librarians to create an EBM session in a Dental School course. One thing that resonated from this presentation was their efforts of "librarian calibration": they involved the BU Center for Excellence in Teaching to improve the teaching and presentation skills of all the librarians who would be participating in the session. Kathryn Skhal from Hardin Library at the University of Iowa described the components of their "360 Degree Library Services" program including small group sessions, case-based "5-minute challenges," and electronic resource centers. They have plans to add their case vignettes to MedEdPORTAL in the future.
Mary Lou Klem from Pittsburgh has been working with the nursing curriculum, integrating a modular system of case-based online instruction built on a MySQL database. And Irena Bond presented the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy's evaluation of EBM knowledge and skills following instruction. In the closing words of her presentation, she stressed the need for new forms of rapid assessment of EBM and searching instruction learner outcomes.

An assessment instrument mentioned by several of the speakers was the Fresno Test. In addition, a systematic review of instruments to evaluate education in evidence based health care was published in JAMA in September 2006.