HLG Nursing Bulletin Vol. 38 (2)
Rebecca Gower and Brianna Cook
Clinical Sciences Library
Clinical Sciences Building
University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust
Clifford Bridge Road
Coventry
CV2 2DX
Tel: 02476 968 829
E-mail: libraryw@uhcw.nhs.uk
Twitter: @UHCWLibrary
This whole day event was for Library Assistants across the West Midlands to come together and discuss their working life, to compare and contrast and swap ideas on our various ways of working. Sameena Ahmed, Brianna Cook, Rebecca Gower and Jackie Morgan attended to represent UHCW.
A presentation regarding career development was given by Bali Moore. She too is a Library assistant and is in the process of completing Certification with CILIP – Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. This sounds very similar to the NVQ Level 3 which many of the staff from UHCW have already gained. Maybe there is a way our qualification could be recognised by CILIP?
Later there was a discussion on the use of social media for promoting
awareness, events and marketing campaigns. At the moment we use Twitter and Instagram to advertise new resources, promote our services and share useful information. Some great ideas and tips were shared between libraries; one that we will endeavour to do more of is spending time at the start of the month to create and schedule tweets to advertise our wellbeing activities such as the book club and knit and natter sessions
This discussion was followed by group session work. The topic was sharing and solving problems. Through talking we realised there was a common thread to some of the problems encountered, mainly ICT issues. We discussed how the libraries have evolved and grown into information centres, thus the need for good quality IT. We also shared aspects of our job that we enjoy and work particularly well.
There were more group presentations in the afternoon, where ideas were shared and questions raised regarding staff development and opportunities for further learning.
At the end of the day we spoke about creating a new mailing list for library assistants. The Health Education England West Midlands team are going to set this up after the workshops in Cambridge and Leicester later this month; we look forward to staying in touch and collaborating with our peers online.
We found the day extremely useful and it was great to meet so many people that we had seen on emails and social media, in real life!
Health Libraries Group 