SHINe-ing brightly in the Antipodes
Introduction
I first heard about ASHSL as an international student at the University of Strathclyde in 1995, during a presentation from Felicity Grainger. I joined the organisation in 1997 when I took the post of Senior Librarian at the then Greater Glasgow Community & Mental Health Services NHS Trust. My then colleague, Jackie Cahoon, had offered to take over the ASHSL Union List editorship from Hazel Williamson just as I was coming into post, and then left; this marked the beginning of my relationship with the soon-to-be renamed SHINE, its Committee and membership which survived my leaving the then Greater Glasgow Primary Care Trust’s Maria Henderson Library in 2001 for a (nearly) four-year sojourn as Science Faculty Librarian at the University of Strathclyde – and is surviving still.
Just as we were celebrating our first decade in Scotland in September 2004, and planning our next one, my wife unexpectedly got a job back in her home town of Dunedin, New Zealand. Three months later we left my beloved Scotland.
Dunedin - named after Dun Eideann (i.e. Edinburgh, complete with the capital’s street names) - was settled by primarily Scottish emigrants from the late 1840s, and is consequently more Scottish than Scotland in many ways, like many expatriate communities. It is a small city of 120,000 - but it does have NZ’s oldest (founded in 1869) and second largest University.
There were only a couple of positions that I ever really wanted in New Zealand, and by incredible coincidence one of them became available in October 2004. I was fortunate, and started in my current post at Easter 2005 after a couple of months at the local College of Education Library.
New Zealand health libraries
NZ’s health system is rather similar to Scotland’s; like so many institutions here (e.g. legal, educational, political), it is based on UK models. NZ’s population is just over four million in an area similar in size to the UK.
Two (Auckland and Otago) of the country’s eight universities (NZ still has Polytechnics) have Medical Schools. Otago has one preclinical (Dunedin) and three clinical Schools (Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington) as well as the country’s only Dental School. There are therefore four university medical libraries (the one in which I work looks after the needs of the Dunedin Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy and Physiotherapy).
There are 21 publicly-funded District Health Boards (DHBs), each with some level of library service. DHBs are similar to NHS Trusts: many libraries have very limited staffing, and provision of services is uneven. There is limited provision for General Practitioners and other community-based health practitioners; the relationship between the private GPs and community practitioners and the DHBs is much looser than in Scotland.
Each of the Medical Schools has a primary teaching hospital/District Health Board associated with it, and the library needs of that hospital/District Health Board are substantially or solely met by the corresponding University medical library, in a contractual relationship. This does have implications for resource sharing, as University provision is far better resourced than almost any DHB in the country.
The situation in NZ in 2005 when I joined health libraries was quite similar to Scotland in 2001 when I left the NHS.
Resource sharing
There is no direct counterpart of SHINE in NZ. There is a Health Special Interest Group (HealthSIG) of LIANZA (the Library and Information Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa, NZ’s equivalent of CILIP) which meets at least annually and has an active discussion list. Interlibrary Lending is handled centrally, through the National Library (i.e. there is no equivalent of SHINE’s Union List).
There are two DHB database consortia in existence; the larger New Zealand Health Database Consortium purchases Ovid databases collaboratively, and a smaller one purchases a number of databases on the Ebsco platform, but there is no eLibrary. Ovid is the leading provider of databases in NZ, and the provider of choice in the four university medical libraries.
My DHB Library colleagues in HealthSIG have been inspired by the electronic libraries in Scotland and England/Wales; a Steering Group was formed from members of HealthSIG and national agencies (e.g. Ministry of Health, Accident Compensation Corporation, New Zealand Guidelines Group, DHBNZ) in 2005 to explore the implications and practicality of wider centrally-funded provision of electronic services. There is a six-month feasibility project underway to develop proposals for a NZ equivalent to the Scottish NHS eLibrary. Among the stated outcomes of the project is funding for a full-time electronic resources co-ordinator.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Health independently funded nationwide public access to Wiley’s Cochrane Library and BMJ’s Best Treatments in 2005, and clinician access to Clinical Evidence in the same year, and central government has funded access to a consortium of (non-health Ebsco and Thomson-Gale) databases, mainly for schools, through the Ministry of Education and the National Library since 2004 (the EPIC project). There are, therefore, precedents for centrally provision of resources.
Summary
New Zealand and Scotland share many similarities, and I have been able to bring my experience from SHINE and work in the NHS and UK higher education to bear on my work in New Zealand. We hope to develop an Antipodean service with similarities to the NHS eLibrary, and there may be scope for collaborative ventures in the future.
It is an exciting time in health librarianship in New Zealand – although I’m not sure that there is ever a dull time in health librarianship, anywhere!
Richard German
Health Sciences Librarian
University of Otago
Dunedin,
New Zealand