As you may know, the recent consultation made changes to the staff and structures that had previously moved to the HIU. While the final structure of the Commissioning Support Service, the terms of reference of individual sections and staff job descriptions are still being finalised, we assume that in future, the Evidence and Library Service will have one post, that of Evidence and Library Manager, rather than the current two posts. This will mean that much of the work done by the current Evidence and Library Officer and all of the work done by the Evidence and Library Manager will need to be covered by one post across the three organisations.
While these changes are happening, in order to use our capacity in the most effective way, the following points show how we are approaching this.
These are our transition objectives:
1. Reduce the volume of work but not the quality of it
2. Empower staff to do more searches autonomously, using the Evidence and Library service for specialist support
3. Increase our ability as a service to plan work and manage requests
These are the changes we are already putting into place to manage the transition period:
Objective 1
• A shorter format for the weekly Health Intelligence Bulletin, with an emphasis on documents rather than news stories
• The monthly journal scanning bulletin replaced by a Contents Pages via RSS service (please contact us if you haven’t had details of how to subscribe to this).
• A reduction in the size of the book collection and journal archive (this relates to older holdings, not current subscriptions).
• Continue to facilitate the use of all NHS Evidence resources (www.evidence.nhs.uk) including the renewal and administration of Athens usernames and passwords.
Objective 2
• Offer regular training sessions to enable staff to use evidence independently.
• Withdraw support to students studying for a Public Health Masters, (who are entitled to Library support from their host University) unless their work is also in a priority area, agreed by management.
Objective 3
• Focus our search request service on priority areas. This is likely to mean that managers submit requests for searches in advance (as opposed to on an ad-hoc basis), linked to work programmes. For searches that are not in priority areas, staff will be encouraged (and receive training) to do these searches themselves. Further details of these changes will be provided. We are reviewing our article supply service and will notify everyone of any changes to this.
• We will be reviewing our support to the Individual Funding Request system and advise anyone submitting requests over the next few months to give as much notice as possible for searches and articles.
• We will be revising our deadlines for completing searches and obtaining articles.
We will be keeping everyone up to date with any further changes as this process progresses. Because of the speed of this particular change process, it is necessary for us to start making these changes in order to manage this as effectively as we can. Please contact myself or Jurgen Schmidt if you have any further queries about these changes
