Informatica medica e biblioteche

Abstract

Librarianship and hospital information systems were the subjects of the paper by Deonilla Pizzi and Valentina Comba presented at the CILEA Conference (June 1995). Sadly, Deonilla Pizzi's sudden death, a tragic loss for Italian librarianship, prevented her from writing another paper on this topic. She had submitted an abstract to the 7th European Conference of Medical Libraries to be held in Coimbra in September 1996.

To summarise the current situation in integrated information systems in the health science centres, the paper reviews the history of integrated academic information management systems in the USA and Canada and also in Europe, where there is a evident lack of leadership, a role played by the National Library of Medicine in the USA. Hence despite the very significant development of medical informatics (mainly in the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Switzerland), integration with library services has still to be achieved. At the 7th ICML, J. Van Bommel stressed the importance of the prompt availability of medical knowledge for clinical decisions: good and efficient library services are needed for a rapidly evolving context in which medical doctors have to evaluate clinical data, in order to determine diagnosis, therapy and so forth.

In Italy, the situation is even worse than in Europe as a whole. The principal reasons for this are the lack of attention paid to library services by Italy's national health service and the absence of training in information skills for medical students and doctors. The partial privatisation of hospitals is leading to tighter control over spending and thus medical informatics should be rethought to take account of the needs of this new economic reality. Will Italian medical librarians succeed in transforming themselves into partners of the computer professionals and health managers?

VALENTINA COMBA, Biblioteca centralizzata di medicina e chirurgia, Università di Torino, corso Dogliotti 14, 10126 Torino, e-mail comba@bib.unito.it.