Supporting Clinical Research at the Bedside

In this video Pamela K. Ginex, EdD, RN, OCN, a nurse scientist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, discusses a successful partnership between a clinical librarian and the nursing staff at her institution, a collaboration that benefits staff and, ultimately, patients.

Please note: Due to technical difficulties with the audio during the shooting of this video, we’ve provided a transcript of the discussion below.

My name is Pamela Ginex, I’m a nurse scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and this is a poster about a collaboration our nursing department has with our medical librarian at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

We have a wonderful partnership where our medical librarian has dedicated time to work with the department of nursing-she comes to our research meetings, our practice meetings, and some of our other meetings to collaborate with nursing. So the nurses know her, love her, and she knows what questions we’re asking, what issues come up, and we’re also able to reach out to her for specific projects.

If we have an idea for an evidence-based practice project, performance improvement or a research project, our nurses are able to reach out to her and work collaboratively to evaluate the literature and see whether there are any gaps that we can fill, or what we’re able to work on going forward.

It’s a great resource for us, because we have a beautiful medical library, lots of librarians who are great resources, so it’s really nice to have dedicated time for a librarian for nursing. We see the benefit of having that collaboration. She’s integrated with all our department and nurses can reach out to her. She does thousands of literature searches a year for the department of nursing, and it’s a huge resource for us. We wanted to highlight that in our poster because we think this may be a resource that other hospitals have that they may be able to capitalize on.

Clinical nurses are very busy-they’re at the bedside, they’re at the chair side, they’re the ones that have the questions and are able to ask the most relevant questions, but they need resources to then answer those questions. This is sort of the first stop in that journey where they’ve evaluated literature to see what is known and what is not known and where the gaps are. We wanted to highlight that here as we feel this is a great resource for our nurses and hopefully other nurses will be able to take advantage of their medical librarians as well.