Designing a proposed educational program for clinical librarian

Accessibility of reliable and up-to-date information to health care providers can lead to effective community health; therefore, experts are needed to retrieve information. These experts, called clinical librarians in developed countries, need special training. Therefore, this study aimed to design a clinical librarian program for training librarians to provide information services in clinical settings.

In this descriptive–applied research, a qualitative approach was adopted. In the first phase, 188 sources related to clinical librarianship were found and validated, and finally 44 sources were selected for analysis. The sources, were reviewed to extract skills which were then reviewed and validated in two Delphi rounds by professors and Ph.D. students of Medical Librarianship in Iran. The selected skills were used to propose an educational program.

In the first phase, four skills among 62, i.e., information literacy, evidence-based medicine, and critical analysis and assessment obtained the highest frequency.
Based on the results of two Delphi rounds, the educational program was designed as short-term training courses consisting of skills with the highest frequency in sources, and the highest mean points from the perspectives of participants in Delphi rounds.

Based on the results it can be concluded that the viewpoints of Delphi contributors concerning clinical librarian skills are largely consistent with those presented in the sources. Therefore, the program designed in this study can be used as a guide for clinical librarianship curriculum designers.