Visible, Valuable, and Validated: Reviving a Safety Net Hospital Library

Background: Presents an overview of an innovative relaunch of library services in a county safety net hospital through increased visibility of librarians, retooled value focused library services, and leveraging interprofessional partnerships across hospital departments. It will include a review of qualitative and quantitative metrics as well as a discussion of innovative approaches and barriers encountered during the library relaunch.

Description: The library relaunch involved preemptive discussion with hospital stakeholders, particularly the Quality department, in the needs and scope of renewed library services. Everything related to the library was redesigned and rebooted including: the website; the collection; the physical space, & scope of services. This was accomplished through unique partnerships with a health science university, diligent tracking of metrics, and gathering feedback from our key stakeholders (both formal and informal). Grants and awards were procured to launch innovative new programs and expand breadth of services.

Conclusion: In the next year, we plan to conduct a thorough retrospective analysis via a mixed methods study to examine the impact of relaunching the library. In addition, we hope to leverage the same scope of retrospective data to draw connections between the new library and library services and impacts on patient care, clinical outcomes, and other quality measures central to the goals of the hospital.