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Librarians Without Borders® HINARI/Health on the Internet Resources Workshop Report: June 17, 2016

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HINARI/Health on the Internet Resources Workshop, Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea (June 13-17, 2016)

This five day workshop was conducted at the Provincial Health Authority/Mt. Hagan Hospital. It was supported by the World Health Organization, WHO Western Pacific Region Office and Librarians Without Borders®/Medical Library Association (LWB). Professor Lenny Rhine and Ms. Dillie George, Health Library, University of Papua New Guinea were the instructors.

Ms. Marie Villemin Partow, Technical Lead, Information Products and Service, WHO Western Pacific Region, initiated the organization of this and a subsequent workshop in Buka, Bougainville, PNG. Also assisting with the somewhat complicated logistics were Ms. Jessica Yiapupu, Ms. Keruma Gamu and Mr. Shaun Haung – all from the WHO PNG Country Office.  Ms. Jolly Kulimbua (training Officer) and Mr. Francis Wau (IT Technician) supported the local arrangements at the venue.   

These workshops were regional based and focused on a somewhat different audience with unique information needs. Besides two medical officers from the Mt. Hagen Hospital and several  training/health promotion staff and the Librarian from the Provincial Health Authority/ Mt. Hagen Hospital, the remainder of the participants were training and health officers or deputy directors from three other provinces’ health authorities and staff from two schools of nursing. Six of the institutions needed to register for Hinari. These tasks were initiated during the workshop and completed the next week with the assistance of the Hinari staff in Geneva.

In the four-and-one-half day workshop, the goals were to have the participants learn the critical skills of Hinari and related resources and be able to conduct training to the various target groups at their respective organizations. Institutions in Papua New Guinea have access to all Hinari publishers except four minor ones so that there is a wealth of information currently available to the users. Plus the language of education in Papua New Guinea is English and this facilitates the use of the Hinari resources.

The modules covered were searching skills and evaluation of health sites on the Internet, Hinari portal including ‘access problems and solutions’, Hinari/PubMed (website, filters, history and advanced search, MY NCBI accounts), the alternate Summon search tool for Hinari, evidence-based medicine, e-book and Internet resources for PNG users, CINAHL (nursing and allied health) database, discussion of Hinari and Research4Life training material, a brief overview of the authorship skills material (How to read and write a scientific paper, plagiarism, web-bibliography, Zotero reference management software). In several ways, the training material was modified to reflect the unique information needs of the provincial training and health information officers and the nursing faculty that attended the workshop.

We also focused on the Hinari marketing module and had all the participants complete the Marketing checklist (spreadsheet). This is a tool for developing a detailed marketing plan for each institution. After six months, the participants will receive a survey that ‘evaluates’ their outcomes and particularly the use of the marketing plan.

The workshop itself started slowly as it began on a national holiday and the IT staff of the Provincial Health Authority were unavailable to set up the workstations with Internet access in the training room. During the 1st day, the program was revised and consisted of much of the non-Internet modules.  By the second day, the training room had decent Internet access using three desktops machines from the library, five laptops using a hotspot tool and several individuals using personal access via their module phones (thank you Shaun Huang and Francis Wau for your assistance). This made the Internet access ‘adequate’ although two or three individuals were required to work together. By the third day, we were able to catch up on all Internet based training modules including the hands-on exercises.

At the end of the workshop, the participants completed post-workshop surveys (attached). Almost all the participants ‘agreed’ that the workshop was well organized, had relevant material with useful ‘hands-on’ exercises, that the trainers were knowledgeable/organized, effective presenters and responsive to questions and that the workshop resulted in their obtaining useful knowledge and skills. According to the participants, ‘major strengths’ of the workshop included Demos/Hands on, Information Gained and Networking. 

There were a somewhat broader reply to the ‘length was appropriate for course content’ question. The responses were 75% replying ‘agree’ and the remaining 25% noting ‘somewhat agree’ or ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘disagree.’ For a group with diverse information needs and somewhat different skill levels, these definitely were positive numbers.

After six months, we plan to distribute a follow-up outcomes survey as this will be an indicator of the actual activities by the participants.  We are most interested in these results especially from the training and health promotion participants who comprised a majority of those attending this workshop.

In conclusion, this was a successful workshop because of the patience (with the Internet access), dedication and skills of the participants. All the activities (particularly the hands-on exercises) were completed in groups and the collaborative interaction of the participants was excellent. This dynamic could be noted in the ‘group exercises’ activities (marketing and workshop scenarios) as the written responses and oral presentations were excellent. 

 

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