Providing Evidence about the Pandemic: Librarian Roles on a Rapid Response Team for COVID-19

This was presented at the 2021 Medical Library Association Annual Meeting [virtual].BACKGROUND: SARS-CoV-2 has led to a deluge of information. Health leaders/personnel need curated and synthesized information to aid their decision making regarding diagnosis, treatment, mitigation, reopening plans, etc. A collaboration involving the state department of health has been developed to respond to those needs. Several programs were created simultaneously, two of which depend on active librarian involvement. One focuses on rapid expert responses to questions from state leadership supported by annotated bibliographies. The other is a daily digest of emerging literature including reviews on patient care, law and ethics, communication, forecasting and surveillance, schools, and mitigation. DESCRIPTION: Librarians from several libraries at a university are responding to the need for synthesized high-quality information related to the pandemic. These librarians have expertise in the areas of evidence-based medicine, data management, public health, and law. From the beginning, librarians have been heavily involved in creating workflows related to project and data management. Project management included having a standard process for tracking questions, delivering information, and team development. Librarians developed the team through onboarding, defining roles, scheduling, consistent communication, and shared document templates. Librarians created data management processes such as citation management, readme files, file management/naming conventions, data backup, etc. Librarians encouraged adoption of creative commons license notices on public-facing work to make the information more accessible. Project assessment was built into workflows and includes tracking: questions, turn around time, updates, and return on investment. CONCLUSION: Since the inception of this program, librarians have answered over 108 questions and provided 18 updates to annotated bibliographies. The average turnaround time for creating annotated bibliographies is 16 hours with a range of 2-48 hours. In addition, librarians have provided searches to support over 900 blog posts for WISE Indiana. While the pandemic has been stressful, this project provided us with an outlet to support our state. In addition, this project has led to: increased visibility for librarians, salary savings for the library, and recognition for our contributions that led to the receipt of an Award for Excellence in Public Health from Dr. Kristina Box​, the State Health Commissioner for Indiana

A Systematic Review of Palpitations Prevalence by Menopausal Status

Purpose of the Review The purpose was to systematically review evidence on the prevalence of palpitations by menopausal stage. Palpitations are a feeling of missed, irregular, or exaggerated heart beats. Recent Findings Carefully delineated search, screening, and data extraction strategies resulted in five articles for review. Articles offered cross-sectional findings from menopausal symptom surveys from five countries between 1974 and 2011 with clinic- and community-based samples of premenopausal, perimenopausal, and postmenopausal women. Reported studies were good (n = 2) to fair (n = 3) quality with low (n = 2) to moderate (n = 3) bias. Menopausal palpitations were not the focus of any study but were assessed as a single item of heart racing, pounding, or discomfort over the past 2 weeks, month, or year. Palpitations prevalence rates by menopausal stage were 3.7 to 40.2% premenopausal, 20.1 to 40.2% perimenopausal, and 15.7 to 54.1% postmenopausal. Three of five articles showed that compared with premenopausal and postmenopausal women, palpitation prevalence was significantly higher among perimenopausal and surgically postmenopausal women. Summary Good-quality evidence on palpitation prevalence by menopausal stage is limited but suggests that physiological changes of menopause may play a role in this symptom. Measurement varied, suggesting a need to standardize the assessment of menopausal palpitations. The review findings suggest a strong need for clinicians and researchers to collaborate to standardize documentation of menopausal palpitations across the menopause transition

Review of menopausal palpitations measures

Palpitations are reported commonly by women around the time of menopause as skipped, missed, irregular, and/or exaggerated heartbeats or heart pounding. However, much less is known about palpitations than other menopausal symptoms such as vasomotor symptoms. The objective of this review was to integrate evidence on menopausal palpitations measures. Keyword searching was done in PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO for English-language, descriptive articles containing data on menopause and palpitations and meeting other pre-specified inclusion criteria. Of 670 articles, 110 met inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Results showed that 11 different measures were used across articles, with variability within and between measures. Inconsistencies in the wording of measurement items, recall periods, and response options were observed even when standardized measures were used. Most measures were limited to assessing symptom presence and severity. Findings suggest that efforts should be undertaken to (1) standardize conceptual and operational definitions of menopausal palpitations and (2) develop a patient-friendly, conceptually clear, psychometrically sound measure of menopausal palpitations

Perspectives on Musical Care Throughout the Life Course: Introducing the Musical Care International Network

Giorgos Tsiris - ORCID: 0000-0001-9421-412X https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9421-412XIn this paper we report on the inaugural meetings of the Musical Care International Network held online in 2022. The term “musical care” is defined by Spiro and Sanfilippo (2022) as “the role of music—music listening as well as music-making—in supporting any aspect of people's developmental or health needs” (pp. 2–3). Musical care takes varied forms in different cultural contexts and involves people from different disciplines and areas of expertise. Therefore, the Musical Care International Network takes an interdisciplinary and international approach and aims to better reflect the disciplinary, geographic, and cultural diversity relevant to musical care. Forty-two delegates participated in 5 inaugural meetings over 2 days, representing 24 countries and numerous disciplines and areas of practice. Based on the meetings, the aims of this paper are to (1) better understand the diverse practices, applications, contexts, and impacts of musical care around the globe and (2) introduce the Musical Care International Network. Transcriptions of the recordings, alongside notes taken by the hosts, were used to summarise the conversations. The discussions developed ideas in three areas: (a) musical care as context-dependent and social, (b) musical care's position within the broader research and practice context, and (c) debates about the impact of and evidence for musical care. We can conclude that musical care refers to context-dependent and social phenomena. The term musical care was seen as useful in talking across boundaries while not minimizing individual disciplinary and professional expertise. The use of the term was seen to help balance the importance and place of multiple disciplines, with a role to play in the development of a collective identity. This collective identity was seen as important in advocacy and in helping to shape policy. The paper closes with proposed future directions for the network and its emerging mission statement.https://doi.org/10.1177/205920432312005536aheadofprintaheadofprin

Open for Health: How Open Access Can Create a More Equitable World

This lesson plan was created for the Scholarly Communications Notebook (SCN). The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholarly communications topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019. In this lesson plan, there is an optional reading list to review the literature related to OA, health equity, and social justice to provide background on the topics depending on student familiarity. A brief PowerPoint lecture is included to provide an overview, and then students will break into groups, and each group will be given a topic with questions to spark discussion on the subject. Questions such as "Historically, how has access to health information created benefits or barriers to users?" or "When thinking about medical research, what stakeholders are concerned about open access and why?" Each group will select a notetaker to keep track of the responses, and time will be given at the end of the class to report out and have a wider discussion with each other

Access to human, animal, and environmental journals is still limited for the One Health community

Objective: ‘‘One Health’’ is an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments they share that relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences. The authors’ objective was to evaluate the extent of open access (OA) to journal articles in a sample of literature from these domains. We hypothesized that OA to articles in human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature. Methods: A One Health seminar series provided fifteen topics. One librarian translated each topic into a search strategy and searched four databases for articles from 2011 to 2012. Two independent investigators assigned each article to human health, the environment, animal health, all, other, or combined categories. Article and journal-level OA were determined. Each journal was also assigned a subject category and its indexing evaluated. Results: Searches retrieved 2,651 unique articles from 1,138 journals; 1,919 (72%) articles came from 406 journals that contributed more than 1 article. Seventy-seven (7%) journals dealt with all 3 One Health domains; the remaining journals represented human health 487 (43%), environment 172 (15%), animal health 141 (12%), and other/combined categories 261 (23%). The proportion of OA journals in animal health (40%) differed significantly from journals categorized as human (28%), environment (28%), and more than 1 category (29%). The proportion of OA for articles by subject categories ranged from 25%–34%; only the difference between human (34%) and environment (25%) was significant. Conclusions: OA to human health literature is more comparable to animal health than hypothesized. Environmental journals had less OA than anticipated

Novel Applications of Modified Ultrafiltration and Autologous Priming Techniques to Reduce Blood Product Exposure on ECMO

Patients needing the assistance of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) are at risk of hemodilution and, in some instances, may require exposure to large amounts of allogeneic blood products. Patient outcomes can be improved by taking steps to reduce transfusions and hemodilution. Currently, modified ultrafiltration (MUF) is used across the world to reduce hemodilution after cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Another common technique during bypass initiation is autologous priming. By applying modified versions of these techniques, ECMO patients may potentially benefit. Usually, patients requiring immediate transition from CPB to ECMO are not stable enough to tolerate MUF. Through alterations of the CPB and ECMO circuit tubing, MUF can be performed once on ECMO. Another technique to potentially lower the transfusion requirements for ECMO patients is a complete circuit blood transfer during an ECMO circuit exchange. While selective component changes are preferred if possible, occasionally a complete circuit change must be done. To minimize hemodilution or prevent priming with blood products, the original ECMO circuit's blood can be transferred to the new ECMO circuit before connecting to the patient. Both of these techniques, in our opinion, helped to reduce the number of transfusions that our ECMO patients have seen during these critical time periods