A day in the life of a clinical librarian

Hello and welcome to 'A day in the life of a clinical librarian' blog series. This is a monthly series sharing what a day at work for those working in clinical librarianship actually looks like and finding out about the person behind the job.


This month we're interviewing our Clinical Librarian Services Manager.

Who are you and where do you work?

I’m Pip Divall and I work as the Clinical Librarian Service Manager at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. I’m mainly based at the Glenfield Hospital Library, but I work across all three hospital sites in Leicester. I manage the team of Clinical Librarians and CISS Officers, as well as providing a service to my dedicated clinical teams.

How long have you been there?

I started as a Clinical Librarian at UHL in October 2004, but had been in a clinical librarian role at George Eliot Hospital for 7 months prior to taking up the post in Leicester. Before that, my first professional role was an Assistant Librarian in a mental health trust in Staffordshire.

What attracted you to Clinical Librarianship?

I first learned of Clinical Librarianship while I was writing my MA dissertation at Loughborough University. A friend was doing her project on the topic and it sounded like a really exciting and inspiring job to do. I didn’t really think much more of it until it came to applying for jobs when the course ended, and I was lucky enough to find myself in the NHS and found that I really enjoyed enquiry work and literature searching. I realised later I’d been doing Clinical Librarianship-lite anyway, as I always sent a summary of my results along with the actual results. 

What does an average day at work involve?

An average day involves meeting with clinicians, either for training or project work. I’m involved in several systematic reviews for the orthopaedic team at the moment. As I manage the team, there are often one-to-ones and working on “managery” things. I’m now on the Knowledge for Healthcare Workforce Development Working Group, so that adds to the “managery” thinking.  I’m also heavily involved with the training programme for the library and education department. I’m really enjoying the use of games to teach information literacy at the moment. Most days I’ll be squeezing in a literature search! 

If you weren’t a Librarian, what would you be?

I’m fascinated by perfumes, so if I weren’t a librarian, I would love to be a perfumer.

Tell us a joke or a non-work fact about yourself

You can have both:

I was once on an episode of Bargain Hunt.

I do a great line in cheese related humour:

What kind of cheese do you use to hide a horse?

Mascarpone.