Background: How do you prepare for that first time rounding with clinicians? What if you do not have a science background or your only medical experience is as a patient? What if you could attend a “mini med school” to familiarize yourself with medical terminology, physiology, anatomy, pharmacy, nursing theory – wait! Let’s just start with the medical lingo that you might hear at the bedside or in the hospital halls.
Description: A mini med school for new medical librarians should teach you the basic prefixes, roots, and suffixes that make up the medical terminology that you will hear spoken among clinicians and noted in the medical record. Having a rudimentary understanding of value ranges for body temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate and blood pressure as well as common labs that patients undergo is handy when clinicians present you with their clinical questions and search requests. Refreshing your memory on the Greek and Latin vocabulary that you last used when studying for SAT/ACT tests will boost your comprehension as you search medical literature databases and scan article abstracts as well. Mini med school modules could be housed within the MEDLIB-Ed platform, and short quizzes and check-ins could be sent out monthly to reinforce deep learning.
Conclusion: A mini med school would benefit new medical librarians in many settings: hospitals, dental clinics, pharmaceutical firms, as well as academic health sciences. Lab values, anatomical terminology, and abbreviations found in clinical notes are not commonly taught in library science programs. Educating librarians on these topics could increase our value as members of a clinical team and make our searching more relevant to our requesters.