Following a Town Meeting forum held at the 1995 NAHSL Conference
in Greenwich, an NAHSL-sponsored project was initiated by a voluntary
group of members. The purpose of this committee was to gather
significant hospital library data that could be accessed by NAHSL
members for benchmarking.
The Town meeting discussion had raised many needs for library
benchmarking data. These uses ranged from matching library partners
for sharing of general information to strategic planning, staffing,
and budget comparisons to continuous education on statistical
data and its value to long-term planning. The wealth of resource
sharing potential is greatly enlarged with an identified source
of maintained information. The possible assistance to one-person
hospital libraries (as well as larger teaching hospital libraries)
was seen as significantly important in the present healthcare
environment of affiliations and mergers.
The NAHSL Benchmarking Committee, has met many times since that
Town Meeting, The Committee has grappled with the difficult tasks
of identifying fields to collect data in; attempting to define
these fields for consistent gathering of like data; designing
and re-designing the survey and library profile; and structuring
what exactly the Committee would support. Input from various size
libraries has been sought as the survey was formulated. The Committee
felt strongly that NAHSL members should have unlimited access
to the benchmarking information and that an electronic database
would be the most efficient way to distribute the information.
In September of 1997, the first distribution of the survey tool
and library profile was distributed. The information received
from the NAHSL libraries was scored and professionally analyzed
using a statistical software application. The data is organized
by cohort group. The cohort groups are defined by total staffing
size.
Some preliminary results of the project were presented at MLA's
Hospital Section in Philadelphia in May, 1998 by Janie Kaplan
(Hartford Hospital) and Robin Rand (Maine Medical Center). Two
other projects presented. They represented the Canadian Medical
Library Association and the Mid-Atlantic chapter area.
Preliminary data will be made available through the NAHSL website
in the 1999 calendar year. The NAHSL Benchmarking and Automation
Committees hope to prepare this information for dissemination
collaboratively.
For further information on the project, please e-mail Janie Kaplan at Hartford Hospital (Kaplan@harthosp.org).
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