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| Annalisa Silvestri, Italian anesthesiologist Photo by Alberto Giuliani https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Covid-19_San_Salvatore_11.jpg |
There were several recurring topics in my casual discussions with colleagues at the Midwest Chapter's annual meeting last October but two that I've been trying to learn more about are: social determinants of health and diversity in medicine. The panel discussion at the Midwest Chapter's annual meeting and conversations with some colleagues afterwards left me wondering how librarians could further provide opportunities for our patrons related to these issues. I was happy to find a group leading very timely and engaging conversations along these lines.
The non-profit group Patients R Waiting works to eliminate these disparities by focusing on increasing diversity in medicine. One of their initiatives is What the Health? a virtual book club that aims to raise awareness regarding health equity. Last month, health care professionals, pre-med/pre-health students and community members from across the US engaged in a conversation about these topics as they discussed Michael Marmot's The Health Gap. The group will be reading two more books this summer and there is still time for you to read the next book and attend their July meeting. They will be discussing Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care by Dayna Bowen Matthew.
The meeting event page and time details provided by the group are below. Please encourage any of your students, providers or fellow librarians to join the discussion.
Consider attending the July meeting even if you don't get a chance to finish the book. I plan on being there!
Dora
Davis
WHSLA Professional Development Coordinator
If interested, please click "going" on our Facebook event, which you can find with the first link below.
-What the Health? Book Club- July 29th Meeting Event Page
-Link to book on: eBay. Amazon
"As a health services researcher, I have always been interested in how to bridge the divide between research and policy. I constantly ask myself, “Which of my research questions will inform today’s most pressing policy debates?” and “How can I teach the next generation of nurse scientists to conduct policy-relevant research?” I recently left my academic position and spent a year working on Capitol Hill as one of eight 2018 –2019 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellows. In this blog, I offer a few key lessons from my time as a fellow that influenced my scholarship." Read the full guest post by Ellen T. Kurtzman, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, associate professor, School of Nursing, The George Washington University.
This article took on special meaning for me since I've rejoined our nurse practice council helping to set policies statewide. The importance of translating research into practice and the current gap between the two is real. Point-of-care tools like Nursing Reference Center Plus certainly help because their nursing skills / procedures are always current, and they offer the current state-of-the art in their evidence care sheets. But it's still a challenge translating the evidence into practice. Here's a road map for making that happen.
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Kinsa’s data has also proved the effectiveness of social distancing and is now pinpointing new spikes around the country.
After states shut down their economies, [Kinsa CEO Inder] Singh says Kinsa data noticed declining levels of fever within three to seven days due to social distancing. Suddenly, the Kinsa thermometer became one of the first real-time data sources at the beginning of the pandemic to prove social distancing was effective.
“This is the whole reason we started the company is to detect, predict and help respond to outbreaks,” [Singh] says. “And this is an opportunity for us to use the data to have a really massive public health impact.”
Abstract: The virus, commonly known as COVID-19 which emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has spread in 213 countries, areas or territories around the globe, with nearly 144 683 deaths worldwide on 18 April 2020. In the wake of this pandemic, we have witnessed a massive infodemic with the public being bombarded with vast quantities of information, much of which is not scientifically correct. Fighting fake news is now the new front in the COVID-19 battle. This regular feature comments on the role of health sciences librarians and information professionals in combating the COVID-19 infodemic. To support their work, it draws attention to the myth busters, fact-checkers and credible sources relating to COVID-19. It also documents the guides that libraries have put together to help the general public, students and faculty recognise fake news.
Keywords: global health; information literacy; information professionals.
In this issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the
World Health Organization (WHO) is presenting a framework for managing the
coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infodemic. Infodemiology is now acknowledged
by public health organizations and the WHO as an important emerging
scientific field and critical area of practice during a pandemic. From the
perspective of being the first "infodemiolgist" who originally coined the
term almost two decades ago, I am positing four pillars of infodemic
management:(1) information monitoring (infoveillance);(2) building eHealth Literacy and science literacy capacity;(3) encouraging knowledge refinement and quality improvement processes such as fact checking and peer-review;
(4) accurate and timely knowledge translation, minimizing distorting factors
such as political or commercial influences.In the current COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations has advocated that facts and science should be promoted and that these constitute the antidote to the current infodemic. This is in stark contrast to the realities of infodemic mismanagement and misguided upstream filtering, where social media platforms such as Twitter have advertising policies that sideline science organizations and science publishers, treating peer-reviewed science as "inappropriate content."
