How committed are our young doctors to EBM?

EBM has, over the last forty years, become the fundamental principle of clinical practice – or, so we thought. Marte Ødegaard reported to the EAHIL 2014 conference about her assessment of final-year students’ knowledge management skills which they have to demonstrate in an assignment. Her analysis showed that a significant proportion of future doctors lack even basic literature searching skills.

Oslo university is addressing the problem, but many in the audience were left feeling uneasy how a similar evaluation would have turned out at our own institutions…

Medical librarians of all nations unite!

Four Scandinavian colleagues proposed that medical librarians across EAHIL collaborate in the field of Information Skills Teaching. They had carried out a survey that clearly demonstrated wide-spread support for sharing teaching materials, but also experiences.

Interestingly, a parallel effort to establish a shared resource for librarians teaching EBM started recently on an MLA forum, and led to the creation of a resource pool (hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University) and a – still informal – mailing list. Let’s see if these two groups will join forces!