Using MLA professional competencies to help support scholarly activity of clinical staff

One of the most intriguing tasks that I have as a clinical and reference librarian at hospital library in which I work, is the work of supporting the scholarly activities of our clinical staff.

As I have learned this support comes in many different roles such as providing poster creation and design help for our nurse residency groups or conducting and maintaining author publication lists for our clinical and resident staff or simply answering reference questions in support of publication.

The goal of supporting these scholarly activities within the clinical setting is to ensure that the library is supporting the evidenced based medicine practice that ensures the best quality of care for our patients. I am proud to be a part of the team but wanted to make sure that I was supporting the team the best way that I could, so I turned to the Medical Library Association’s Professional Competencies (https://www.mlanet.org/page/test-competencies ) to ensure that I was on the right track.

I realized that I was meeting the competence of Health information professionalism by seeking out assistance  through the collaborative work of the MLA  communities(https://www.mlanet.org/page/special-interest-groups-landing-page) and their listserv emails list serves and by  utilizing the competency itself  to guide my work.

The competencies of supporting evidenced based practice and research, instruction and instructional design as well as the competency for leadership and management were helpful in providing guidance for managing the marketing to the various clinical groups and the implementation of the processes used to provide training to the nursing residency groups and in the fine tuning of the existing author publication reporting procedure.

Utilizing the Medical Library Association’s Professional Competencies assisted me and strengthened by abilities to support the information needs and provide the right information services to support the scholarly activity of my clinical staff.