Date: 14 July 2021
Time: 8.30 am-4.30 pm
Platform: Zoom

This workshop is a collaboration between MLG PPM and UM Library. Previously, we held the EBM workshop for Medical Librarians on 24-25 February 2020 and had 27 participants. A nationwide event to create awareness and to train medical librarians in the country. A big thank you to Prof Liew Su May, Prof Ng Chirk Jenn, and Dr. Ranita from UM for spearheading the initiative.

This workshop was held again this year. This time it is open to all librarians with the objective of creating an awareness regarding Evidence-based medicine and some introduction to Systematic reviews. This EBM workshop is also a great success because we have participants that are non-medical librarians too. There are 42 librarians registered from UM, IMU, NIH, UMS, UPNM, NUMed, USM, University of Nottingham, Pustaka Negeri Sarawak, UniKL, UKM, UiTM, and IIUM. It is nice to see good feedback from all the libraries. It is good exposure, and these are the skills that all librarians should obtain as much as they can because they might be useful in the future.  This workshop is officiated by the PPM President, Dr Rashidah Bolhassan and Pn Zanaria Saupi Udin, the Deputy Chief Librarian, University of Malaya Library has delivered her closing speech.

The objectives of this workshop are to introduce the process of evidence-based medicine to librarians and provide collaboration opportunities among librarians and medical doctors. We hope at the end of the session, librarians will have a better understanding of the clinical research methodology and clinical evaluation in the health field. This program will assist participants in identifying basic research design formats for clinical medicine and to arrange focused clinical questions, peer review search strategies, and assessing biased risks in published researches. In the literature, we know that implementing the best research evidence in clinical settings is crucial for high-quality patient care. However, health researchers, clinicians, and health policymakers still struggle to find solutions to create and disseminate relevant clinical evidence to practicing clinicians in a timely and usable manner. So, this is where the librarians proficient in searching for clinical evidence can contribute and support the clinicians to make clinical decisions. Librarians can demonstrate knowledge of available information resources and tools, perform database searches using Boolean operators, in a manner that reflects an understanding of medical language, terminology, and the relationships among medical terms and concepts and refine search strategies to improve relevance and completeness of retrieved answers. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are considered the highest levels of evidence for informing clinical decisions.

On behalf of the Medical Library Group PPM and UM Library, we would like to thank the speakers, Prof Lai Nai Ming, Pn Noraida Hassan, Dr. Ranita, and Cik Zuhanariah for sharing your knowledge and experience with us. We are so happy that Prof Lai agreed to spare some of his precious time to share his expertise and it’s an honor to meet one of the EBM pioneers in Malaysia. It is also a pleasure to have Pn Noraida and Cik Zuhanariah with us today, they are one of the librarians that were working on EBM many years ago. Thank you so much for agreeing to this and spare your time with everyone today. It is nice to see that there is awareness regarding evidence-based medicine in the librarianship field. 

By Dr. Ranita Hisham, Senior Librarian