Understanding Healthcare Information

Citation

Weaver, J. (2011), "Understanding Healthcare Information", Library Management, Vol. 32 No. 1/2, pp. 134-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121111102674

The information explosion is an accepted phenomenon of twenty‐first century life: the average person intuitively understands that there is a wide variety of types of information available, and librarians explain the differences in more detail to generationally different clients. But to unpick “information”, even in one disciplinary area, is now a formidable task, and this is the brave attempt that Lyn Robinson has made with her book Understanding Healthcare Information.

The book will be a useful reference for library and information science students and academics, especially those focusing on healthcare information. Although Robinson states in her introduction that the book is also aimed at a wider audience (“… all of us … are likely to encounter a need or desire to interact with information in this field” p. xi), the ambitious coverage of the book, its descriptive nature, and the academic framework in which the content is presented, will probably limit the interest of a wider audience.

Robinson has chosen to unbundle healthcare information using a theoretical framework first proposed by Hjorland (2002) known as domain analysis. The framework allows a broad approach to the field by describing it within the domains of history, organisations, producers and users, resources, and management. The content is descriptive, and does not invite “dipping” in order to discover how to find a particular chunk of information, or even how to discover healthcare information. For example, Chapter 5: Healthcare information sources, services and retrieval, provides a classified arrangement of material types with little discussion of their discovery and use. Other sections, for example Chapter 6: Healthcare information and knowledge management, touch lightly on integrated services like the UK NHS Evidence service, but the potential for interaction between the variety of users and healthcare information afforded by the semantic web and mobile devices is not explored.

This book is a sound descriptive framework of the variety of health care information and will be useful to library and information science students and early practitioners, especially in schools where a course or module on healthcare information resources and services is provided.