Setting up a Clinical Outreach Service

Lorena Cascant has very kindly let us share her summary of responses to 'Setting up a Clinical Outreach Service' which she recently shared on LIS-Medical.

She would also like to give acknowledgements to Rebecca Mitchelmore, Jenny Lang, Lisa Lawrence and Erica Rae for sharing their experiences.

DON’T

1. Don’t hide in the library!!! Keep active, be glamorous, outgoing, chatty, sociable individual
2. Don’t get disheartened. They can be quite suspicious at first; not understanding why you’re there & how what you can do is relevant to their day to day work. It takes time to build up their trust & willingness to engage, it’s a slow start

DO

1. Train yourself: clinical training, communication skills, EBM, CASP
2. Understand your organisation, how it works, where the departments are, research they do
3. Build up contacts
   1. Clinical champions to help you spread the word and big up your service and introduce you round and start embedding process
   2. Tap into clinical facilitators or educator roles as these can be very good for getting nursing and allied health staff involved
   3. Acquaintances
4. Start small: piloting with one or two teams first
5. Try to be invited to join their meetings, teaching time, journal clubs or even social events. It enables you to not only become accepted as part of them, but give you much more an idea of what their motivations are for search requests, sets the question in context. Ward round are the best.
6. Go to
   1. Regular ward round
   2. Attendance at the weekly MDT meeting
   3. Attendance to Education or CPD meetings
   4. Quarterly complex case clinics
   5. Trust Wide Committees, gets the whole organisation to take you more seriously and ties into the EBP and clinical governance agenda (Clinical practice development committee, Innovations and horizon scanning committee, joint professions advisory committee, surgical education group)
7. Let the teams to help in the design of the service they get
8. Do library presentations at various team meetings: a good way of advertising what the library could do for the team
9. Opportunism better than planned initiatives unless you know a specific need exists
10. Do current awareness a way of marketing our services, put stuff under their nose, rather than them asking for it.
11. Do keep an eye on NHS Networks or relevant no-NHS groups or organisations you can keep an eye on for staying current yourself
12. Try any form of mobile technology you can reasonably use for looking stuff up whilst you’re with them, rather than having to wait for a PC
13. Promote all the time some high-turnover staff
14. Marketing and publicity
    1. Conventional routes of webpages
    2. Trust’s staff bulletin
    3. Emails
    4. Shared open days with the Training & Development Dept.
    5. Small stands to get into conversation at cafeteria
15. Plans for how you are going to audit and evaluate your service