by Laura Dobie, Knowledge and Information Skills Specialist, Healthcare Improvement Scotland

The SHINe CPD day and AGM took place on 22^nd October 2019 at New Register House in Edinburgh. It was a really beautiful setting, and there was much reverential murmuring about all the books (see below)…

Networking – with friendly competition…

We had professional bingo as an icebreaker. It was a great way to make new connections, and to learn new things about people that I had already met.

Write for the goldfish

We started the day with a really interesting session on Writing for Social Media from Anne Robb at the Google Digital Garage. There were lots of useful pointers in the presentation, and it gave us all some food for thought on how we could apply these in practice to better promote our services.

Here are some of the key points that I took away from the session:

• Consider how your brand or service would speak if it were a person.
• It is good to have brand guidelines to ensure consistency in communications.
• Attention spans are short, so write for the goldfish!
• Imagine that people will only read the first half of your sentence – put the essential information at the beginning.
• Writing about the benefits of something is more compelling than simply describing its features. E.g., for a fitness tracker:

Feature	Benefit
Waterproof	Take it swimming
5mm thick glass	Smash proof
Comes in black, gold, white, etc.	Choose a colour to suit your personality
Spherical interface	Comfort and style

We also discussed longer form content and where this could work. Anne commented that longer articles work well on platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium. I’d like to try out some longer posts on the Living Well in Communities blog to see if they generate interest.

Sharing and learning at the knowledge market

After lunch, members had the opportunity to learn about different areas of work from across the network.

• Developing a knowledge sharing toolkit – Tomas Muniz, Healthcare Improvement Scotland

Tomas discussed the work of the Knowledge Management Team at Healthcare Improvement, and the knowledge sharing toolkit that is currently in development. The toolkit provides brief descriptions of a range of tools, from After Action Reviews to World Cafes. The toolkit also highlights the purpose of the various tools, such as connecting people to people, connecting people to good practice and sharing learning. Tools are also rated according to their complexity and requirements.

The team is developing the toolkit as a decision aid that is tailored to their needs, which will help staff to quickly identify ways to have better conversations. They will also emphasise the importance of regular knowledge sharing through a proactive marketing plan.

• F1000 Workspace: a tool for managing grey literature – Julia Green, NHS Health Scotland

Julia demoed F1000 Workspace, which has many similar features to EndNote/RefWorks. It can be used to capture, save and organise references from anywhere on the web, it supports external collaboration, and it makes it easy to creates bibliographies in Word and Google Docs. Anyone can be invited to collaborate on a project and it’s possible to create tags to identify themes, screen content, and add notes to papers.

Health Scotland have decided to use this because the Write n Cite features of EndNote/RefWorks do not work with document storage on SharePoint, to which Health Scotland has now migrated, and which the rest of NHSScotland will migrate to in the future.

• Public health community of practice – Alison Bogle, NHS National Services Scotland and Carol Hallesy, NHS Lanarkshire

Alison and Carol discussed developing a community of practice (CoP) for public health librarians in Scotland to help enhance core professional skills, such as:

• evidence searching and summarising for a public health audience
• improving partnership working;
• mapping capacity and capability across the system
• building capacity through support and training, and
• providing advocacy and influence.

They have met with the Academic Health Science Partnership in Tayside and in February they held at a one-day training course on selecting and summarising for the public health workforce. The group is also learning more about the work of the Local Intelligence Support Team and has submitted a poster proposal for the Faculty of Public Health in Scotland Conference in November 2019. Future plans include mapping information and knowledge support for the public health workforce, and evaluating the CoP, potentially through an outcomes-focused approach.

The new Public Health Scotland body will bring together the Health Management Library and Health Protection Scotland Library teams, along with Knowledge Services team at Health Scotland.

• Developing the MyPsych mobile app for mental health services – Tracey McKee,  NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

Tracey discussed how librarians have worked with clinicians to develop a usable knowledge tool. The vision for MyPsych is that it will eventually be a ‘one stop information shop’, primarily for mental health staff working with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC). Their work on the app is aligned with the Right Decision Service and the national decision support work led by Dr Ann Wales at the Scottish Government. The app has been five years in the making:

• October 2014 – Initial discussions began.
• October 2016 – Launched app for students with the aim of improving their psychiatry placement experience and potentially influencing their career choice. The Royal College of Psychiatrists currently have a campaign on this issue, Choose Psychiatry.
• February 2018 – Start of plans to expand the app. Pharmacy colleagues approached the library team to find a new home for their guidance due to low levels of access via the intranet.

The app has been a collaboration between the NHSGGC Library Network and colleagues across NHSGGC Mental Health Services. They plan to launch the app officially on Thursday 12th December 2019 with three information toolkits:

• a prescriber toolkit, which will contain mental health medicines guidance from pharmacy,
• a research toolkit, which aims to improve recruitment to trials and encourage staff to be more research active, and
• a toolkit for undergraduate medical students to use on their psychiatry placements throughout NHSScotland.

• Getting improvement work published – Laura Dobie, Healthcare Improvement Scotland

I discussed what I had learned from supporting the Living Well in Communities team to write up a frailty improvement project for publication in BMJ Open Quality. It’s fair to say that there are a lot of things that I would do differently next time around(!), and that I learned a lot from the process, particularly around responding to reviewer comments (ensuring that they are allocated to the author who is best-placed to respond to them) and how to structure submissions. I’ve developed an article submission checklist to streamline the process, and I would use the SQUIRE guidelines in the future to structure improvement articles and ensure that all the necessary information is included. I think that this would save time and corrections for future submissions.

Getting down to business

At the AGM, Iain Stewart provided an overview of the membership, while Julia Green provided a Treasurer’s update. Charis Miller as Chair looked back over the past year and the various activities of the network, including last year’s CPD day and AGM, and the visit to Glasgow Women’s Library.

A walk around the archives

At the end of the day we had an interesting and informative tour with Jocelyn Grant, one of the archivists. It was great to learn about the history of the building and the role of the National Records of Scotland, and to have the opportunity to take even more photos of books…