Librarians’ involvement in evidence-based medical practice and health policy-making: the collaboration between Albert Cook Library and the Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation

KINENGYERE, Alison Annet, SSENONO, Richard and OBUKU, Ekwaro (2015) Librarians’ involvement in evidence-based medical practice and health policy-making: the collaboration between Albert Cook Library and the Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2015 - Cape Town, South Africa in Session 208 - Health and Biosciences Libraries.

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Language: English (Original)
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Abstract

Librarians’ involvement in evidence-based medical practice and health policy-making: the collaboration between Albert Cook Library and the Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation

In 2013, Makerere University College of Health Sciences (MakCHS) received funding support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada, to establish an Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation. The aim of the Centre is to build capacity for knowledge translation for health policy in Uganda and East Africa. The Centre is steadily transforming Uganda and the East African region into an environment that is driven by evidence informed health policy and action, and one that is self-reliant in capacity for evidence synthesis and knowledge translation. The Centre team comprises clinical epidemiologists, public health physicians, health policy analysts, health systems researchers and library and information scientists. The paper examines the instructional and research roles of health sciences librarians at the Centre, in informing evidence-based medical practice and health policy-making. The paper was informed by data from the Centre activities: courses conducted in knowledge translation (such as a course on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of health systems research), systematic reviews and evidence-informed policy briefs (completed and in-publication), and reports, focusing on the librarians’ activities. The findings show that the health librarian's role as an expert searcher and evidence locator in a systematic review process is steadily embracing further roles of formulator of research questions using PICO, developer of exclusion/inclusion criteria, quality literature filterer, critical appraiser, systematic reviews author as well as educator. Library and information scientists are playing vital instruction and research roles in learning, teaching, research, as well as informing evidence based medicine and health policy.

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