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MLA Distance Education

Keeping Patients Safe: Roles for Information Professionals

Keeping Patients Safe: Roles for Information Professionals

MLA's Educational Webcast
Held November 16, 2005

To top of page Presenters

Jeannine Cyr Gluck, AHIP
Director, Library and Continuing Medical Education, Eastern Connecticut Health Network–Manchester

Jeannine Cyr Gluck has held her position as director of the Medical Library at Eastern Connecticut Health Network (ECHN) since 1986. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and master's of library science degree from the University of Rhode Island.

At ECHN, Gluck provides for the information needs of the clinical and nonclinical staffs of two campuses, Manchester Memorial and Rockville General Hospitals. Attendance at multidisciplinary rounds in the intensive care unit has given her a closer look at the interactions of illness, medical professionals, technology, and family in the lives of real people.

Integration of library support into hospital administration has long interested Gluck. She serves on ECHN's Quality Improvement Council and Medication Safety Committee and supports nursing administrators and managers in their efforts to redesign nursing care. She continually assesses needs of individuals, committees, and other groups and customizes services in response. From this grew her MLA CE course, "Running with the Squirrels: Providing Library Services for Healthcare Administrators." This workshop pays particular attention to the roles of quality and patient safety professionals, risk managers, and others concerned with safety issues.

Her colleagues probably most closely associate Gluck with standards. She led the effort to create the "Standards for Hospital Libraries 2002" and contributed to the 2004 revisions. She spoke before the national library association of Spain at their 2003 conference in Málaga to discuss the development of those standards. After serving as MLA's liaison to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) from 2000 to 2003, she became a member of the Joint Commission's Information Management Work Group, which revised the IM chapter of the Comprehensive Accreditation Manuals. The Connecticut State Medical Society includes her on its Continuing Medical Education (CME) Committee, which accredits CME programs of hospitals in the state and enforces the MLA standards along with those of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. She has worked to extend the benefits of mandatory library requirements to other states.

In August 2005, Gluck assumed oversight of ECHN's CME program. The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions published her article, "The Contribution of Hospital Library Services to Continuing Medical Education."

Gluck's involvement in these areas gives her a view of patient safety from many angles. Understanding clinical care, seeing the efforts of administrators to design effective processes, following JCAHO's increasing focus on patient safety, and helping to make CME more effective in altering the habits of caregivers center around quality of care and patient safety. She coauthored "Knowledge Maps for Patient Safety" with Lorri Zipperer and Susan Anderson, published in the Journal of Hospital Librarianship. Her current project, an annotated guide to the literature of patient safety, will be published in early 2006. She is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals.

Watch MLANET for more information! Or contact Debra Cavanaugh, mlapd3@mlahq.org, 312.419.9094 x32.

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