Book discussion course: timely topics for medical students.

Several library faculty members at the Louisiana State University Health Shreveport Health Sciences Library offered a book discussion course as an elective for first-year medical students. This article provides details on how the librarians developed, taught, and evaluated this elective. The librarians took a team-teaching approach, required the students to read two books, and outlined the criteria for participation.

Diabetes Implementation of a Self-management Program in Resource Poor and Rural Community Clinics.

Purpose: To evaluate the implementation of a brief diabetes self-management support intervention designed for resource-poor community clinics.

Methods: The authors conducted a pilot study among patients with type 2 diabetes in 3 community clinics. The intervention consisted of research assistants introducing and reviewing a diabetes self-management guide, helping patients set an achievable behavioral action plan, and following up with 2 telephone sessions.

Assessing the FACTTS: an evidence-based medicine and critical appraisal course for medical students.

The Fourth-year Academic Clinical Training and Teaching Selective (FACTTS) is a course taught by medical and library faculty on the practice of evidence-based medicine and critical appraisal of the medical literature. This study assesses the impact of the course on students' understanding of the subject matter by examining three years of pre- and post-test data and addresses whether the number of sessions in the course affects the knowledge gained by the students. The data show an improvement in the students' understanding of course material, but no benefit was found in having two versus three sessions.

Combining history of medicine and library instruction: an innovative approach to teaching database searching to medical students.

Library faculty members at the Health Sciences Library at the LSU Health Shreveport campus offer a database searching class for third-year medical students during their surgery rotation. For a number of years, students completed "ten-minute clinical challenges," but the instructors decided to replace the clinical challenges with innovative exercises using The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus to emphasize concepts learned. The Surgical Papyrus is an online resource that is part of the National Library of Medicine's "Turning the Pages" digital initiative.

Critical appraisal process: step-by-step.

We present information describing how to search to identify those reports that provide insight into the answer to the query. We have presented a reasonable approach to searching, with our end-point being the identification of published articles which appear to answer our queries. The decision as to whether these articles are applicable to the patient under discussion is determined by our clinical knowledge and the specifics of the patient's medical concerns.

Statistics for the nonstatistician: Part I.

Clinical research typically gathers sample data to make an inference about a population. Sample data carries the risk of introducing variation into the data, which can be estimated by the standard error of the mean. Data are described using descriptive statistics such as mean, median, mode, and standard deviation.

Decreased hospital length of stay associated with presentation of cases at morning report with librarian support.

Objective: The research sought to determine whether case discussion at residents' morning report (MR), accompanied by a computerized literature search and librarian support, affects hospital charges, length of stay (LOS), and thirty-day readmission rate.

Methods: This case-control study, conducted from August 2004 to March 2005, compared outcomes for 105 cases presented at MR within 24 hours of admission to 19,210 potential matches, including cases presented at MR and cases not presented at MR. With matching criteria of patient age (+/- 5 years), identical primary diagnosis, and secondary diagnoses (within 3 additional diagnoses) using International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) codes, 55 cases were matched to 136 controls.

Using a portable wireless computer lab to provide outreach training to public health workers.

Librarians at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport developed an outreach program for public health workers in north Louisiana. This program provided hands-on training on how to find health information resources on the Web. Several challenges arose during this project.