Exploring a New Clinical Librarian Position Through a Library Residency Program: Plans, Pivots, and Potential

Background: New positions that meet emerging needs can be difficult to establish in medical libraries. The University of Chicago Library created a residency program to explore new positions and demonstrate their value by hiring recent graduates with new skills for two-year residencies. The objective of the Clinical Library Resident (CLR) position was to demonstrate the benefit of additional medical librarians who provide point-of-need services and information support to medical professionals at The University of Chicago Library serving the Pritzker School of Medicine and UChicago Medicine. Services included embedded rounding with medical teams and providing instruction sessions and research consultations to medical students, residents and faculty.

Description: The plan: The CLR started their residency by working with hospital administration to introduce the new embedded rounding service to different specialties and successfully partnered with 5 clinical teams. Two months later, the pandemic shut down the University and remote work began. The pivot: With the disruption, the CLR quickly shifted, establishing the COVID-19 Educational Support Team to perform literature syntheses and answer COVID-related questions for frontline clinicians. The CLR soon began rounding remotely, joining teams with established virtual rounds and initiating virtual rounding services with teams that were in-person. The CLR also began teaching and consulting remotely during this time. When onsite work resumed, the CLR returned to in-person rounds, helped design a medical school elective, and partnered to create critical appraisal workshops for nurses and a nursing journal club. The potential: a full time position is currently being created.

Conclusion: The CLR position was created to address the University of Chicago and UChicago Medicine’s need for additional clinical information support and to expand the library’s staff of medical librarians. The impact of the CLR position was assessed via an informal survey of the rounding teams, which demonstrated the value of the service. The CLR increased the number of rounding teams from one to six, provided over 50 consultations, and led over 30 instruction sessions that otherwise would not have occurred. The CLR-led COVID-19 Educational Support Team directly resulted in the creation of the ASAP (Ask-Search-Appraise-Perform) elective, a critical appraisal elective for the medical school. The objective of the CLR position was achieved, as shown through survey results, increased services provided, and creation of a full-time clinical librarian position.