Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Dora Davis

 

Michele: In March, I participated in a listening session with Erica Lake from the NNLM Region 6.  In preparation, I asked a few WHSLA Members for their candid answers to the following questions:

1. What challenges do you face with work?
2. What inspires you at work?
3. What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, esp. on the hospital side.

With their permission, I am sharing the responses here on the WHSLA Blog in a series with the hope that WHSLA Members will get to know each other better, share some great ideas and best practices, and realize that we may be facing a lot of the same challenges in a post- (Are we there yet?) pandemic world.

Dora Davis is The WHSLA Professional Development Coordinator one of 2 WHSLA Members-at-Large.  She works as a Medical Librarian for ProHealth.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

Dora: My main challenge is being available to the providers.  I am pool so I only work when there are requests.  However, there are ALWAYS requests.  I cannot work more than 10 hours per week and often times that’s not enough to even work on the pending requests.  Sometimes by the time I get to a request, they no longer need it.  Also, hearing from providers time and time again that they just don’t understand why the library isn’t seen as valued.  I appreciate them telling me, but they are preaching to the choir.  I always send them to the man in charge.

2) What inspires you at work?

Dora: I am absolutely inspired by my core group of library users.  They are always appreciative of the help.  I also find it recharging to be able to help someone find resources that they didn’t think existed.  I almost never hear the outcome of a request but recently I had a physician contact me to tell me that their patient was doing much better thanks to some resources I provided that helped them argue the case for their insurance coverage and they wanted to thank me. I felt such joy I’m almost embarrassed to write about it.  I had been sitting here having an existential crisis about my job and thinking I couldn’t possibly make a difference in my limited hours so maybe I should reconsider.

3) What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, especially on the hospital side.  MLA seems to be doing more CE for the academic librarians these days, and NNLM is doing more outreach to public libraries now.  So what would be most helpful for those of us still working in hospital libraries?

Dora: I would love CE on making our roles more efficient.  I am currently working on short video tutorials on library topics, since I don’t have time to do 1:1s at all anymore.  Example: My first [video tutorial] was titled “search engine OR database” and it was a tik tok style video.  I kept getting literature requests where people answered “google” to the question “what databases have you searched already?” (A benefit of not working here regularly/post covid is that I have time to look for inspiration outside of the library for teaching skills).

Tips and Tricks from seasoned veterans would also be amazing.  One that I use that helps me tremendously is to create signatures for FAQs.  I have those same FAQs on the library page but no one ever reads them.  Now when I get an email asking me where the request forms are, or how to register for UptoDate, I just click on the signature and save myself lots of time.  I’m sure others out there have their own tricks that make the job easier?

I do work on things like the Evidence Based Practice group and sometimes participate in providing Nursing CEUs.  Maybe some CEs on how to provide these would help.  So for the EBP group I am on the “faculty” and I teach their first class on finding evidence and then I provide assistance as the cohort goes on.  For Nursing, sometimes our education department will host a learning fair for the nurses and I will provide a version of the EBP class tailored to nurses and then it’s bundled with some other items to give them CEUs.  So I guess I would like to see CE for myself on things we can provide for these instances besides EBP.  I think hosting things like this makes our value more tangible to some stakeholders so I feel like I need all the help I can get for hosting more of these but on limited time to plan.

Thank you, Dora!   If you want to know more about Dora, check out this post on the WHSLA Blog.

If you would like to participate and share your answers to these 3 questions in a similar post for the WHSLA Blog, email Michele Matucheski with your answers and I'll make sure it gets posted.