Sally Thomas, Outreach Librarian, Royal Stoke University Hospital, University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (UHNM)
We began recruiting Knowledge and Library Ambassadors to be our advocates within the hospital (and beyond!). We wanted people from all sorts of roles to give us honest feedback about our services, make suggestions, and promote our resources and services.
Our main aims were:
- Increase engagement, in terms of a greater number of staff accessing our resources, physical space or services
- Deepen our engagement, to become more embedded in teams and workflows across the hospital, to get involved in new areas of work
How it started:
A number of library staff suggested current library users who would be interested in becoming an Ambassador. We also posted messages on the intranet and in the internal bulletins of our community-based NHS customers. We used an email template to contact people who were interested, this explained what we’d like them to do as Ambassadors, and what they could expect from us.
Once we had about 30 Ambassadors, we advertised our first meeting, a 45min MS Teams session entitled: Why don’t people use the library? Ambassadors from a range of backgrounds attended such as occupational therapists, healthcare scientists, nurses, pharmacists and consultants. Quite a number had a role that involved training other staff. The session was very lively with many suggestions. These ideas were translated into an action tracker based on three main themes: Access to library services, awareness of resources and library promo/communication methods.
Some examples of the suggestions:
- More tailored promotional materials
- Additional support for studying staff
- More visits from library staff at Continuing Medical Education meetings
- Additional book stock coverage in key topic areas
- More promotion of current awareness services
What then?
Since the programme started in April 2025 we have:
- Delivered five live sessions for our Ambassadors on MS Teams. Topics were;
- current awareness services demo
- point of care tools demo
- health literacy taster session
- ebooks/Knowledge Hub demo
- a ‘round-up’ session showing what we’d all achieved.
- We created tailored promotional materials, and have been invited to a number of CME meetings to deliver talks on how the library can help, or specific things like the Knowledge Hub
- We bought some new book titles and promoted them to Ambassadors
- We created a site on NHS Futures to help them keep in touch via the discussion-thread function, and to store leaflets and posters that might be useful to them
- We now attend some clinical team staff meetings regularly and have begun additional current awareness support work
To sum up…
It has been difficult to match the initial meeting participation, with attendance much lower in later sessions. I’m not sure the Futures site is the best way to keep in touch asynchronously, and things like specific Library Tours for Ambassadors have had low take-up despite being an Ambassador suggestion. Our Ambassadors are, after all, very busy people!
The project has been effective in terms of making contacts and being able to get into meetings and attend events to spread the word about the library. We now have stronger links with some departments, and their enthusiasm has been great. I’m pleased that we have our partner organisations represented in our Ambassadors, as we serve GP-Practice staff, ICB staff and our local mental health Trust. We are now starting to see non-clinical staff become Ambassadors, which is great as we can promote our support for staff in admin and leadership roles. All library staff at both our hospital sites have been involved in recruiting Ambassadors and promoting the scheme. A special mention for Lauren Hulme for designing our badges and posters. I am grateful to everyone who has been involved, our lovely library teams and our lovely Ambassadors. We begin our second year of the scheme with much to do, but much to build upon.
Health Libraries Group 