International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award

The International Clinical Librarian Conference Evidence into Practice Award for 2013 was awarded at the One Health conference in May,  shown above are the winner, Ms Vasumathi Sriganesh, Sarah Sutton for the ICLC Organising Committee, and  2012/13 MLA President Jane Blumenthal.  The award was established this year, to honour a practising librarian or informationist who has made outstanding contributions to bringing evidence into practice in the field of healthcare. The winner, Ms Vasumathi Sriganesh, was presented with her award and cash prize of $500 at the One Health Conference. The cash award was kindly sponsored by Dynamed and Ms Sriganesh has asked that the award go to the QMed Knowledge Foundation.

Ms. Vasumathi Sriganesh worked as a hospital librarian and later as a consumer health librarian in Mumbai, India, during the years 1992-1997, when Medline was on CD ROM and a little later, when Internet access entered the Indian scenario. She discovered that she was good at handling these resources and also that most doctors were quite so successful. She felt that there was a need to reach out to a large audience and not only her library users.  

In 1997, she started off as an independent consultant to help health professionals use Internet resources. In 1999 she set up “QMed Services” as a consulting organization.  She later realized that she not only needed to offer help, but needed to do a lot of advocacy to ensure that correct literature searching, reference management and evidence based health care needed to be taught and actually included in the medical (and allied health) curriculum. She set up “QMed Knowledge Foundation” in 2007, as a “Not for Profit Trust”, so that there would be better acceptance of her recommendations and also her workshops. With the support of five colleagues, she has conducted more than 100 workshops on literature searching / searching for evidence. She has delivered an equal number of short lectures on these topics to promote awareness of the need for such knowledge. She also offers support authors of Systematic Reviews, by coordinating with Trial Search Coordinators, and helps the South Asian Cochrane Network & Centre in her country, with her expertise.  

Having created web-based resource manuals, her next activity is to create E-Learning modules and also initiate Train the Trainer programs to spread her programs more quickly, in the country. Her goal is to see that literature searching skills will be included in the curriculum, and that strong library support will be available to all health professionals for the provision of evidence based healthcare in the country.

The One Health Conference was an international meeting incorporating MLA ’13 and the 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), the 7th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS), and the 6th International Clinical Librarian Conference (ICLC). If you would like to catch up on any of the ICLC sessions, the One Health Blog includes blogs on all of the ICLC sessions by the ICLC official bloggers and other interested commentators. Head over here to find out more: http://npc.mlanet.org/mla13/.