RVH Health Library Celebrates a Quarter Century

This year the RVH Health Library celebrates its 25th anniversary.

(Above) Donna Smith-Roselle, Library Technician, stands in front of the RVH Health Library

Since 1997, the RVH Health Library has always been an integral part of the hospital’s commitment to provide up-to-date, evidence-based health information to physicians, staff, patients, and visitors throughout Simcoe County.

Located on Level 2 beside Victoria’s Gift Shop, the library provides patients and visitors free, reliable, and contemporary health information on a variety of healthcare topics. This provides a valuable resource for promoting health literacy in our community and better enabling patients and their families to stay informed about decisions in their care pathway. Moreover, the library provides specialty services to TEAM RVH through a large on-site collection of medical textbooks, periodicals, evidence-based clinical reference materials, online e-resources and directories, as well as full-version article retrieval and personal training on navigating clinical and research databases.

Despite periodic closures due COVID-19 restrictions, the library saw information requests rise by 18% in 2021-‘22. To answer these requests, the library provided over 902 articles and facilitated 203,577 searches via its online e-resources catalog, up 7% over the previous year. In addition, RVH’s Health Library Technician, performed 45 comprehensive literature reviews for TEAM RVH.

Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated a rising trend among libraries to offer more trusted, easily-accessible digital collections and modernized touch-down spaces for visitors.

To facilitate this growing demand for digital resources, the library started forming new partnerships with virtual healthcare education leaders in 2021-‘22, including IMD Health, an online patient engagement platform that features content from over 90 trusted health organizations from across Ontario and Canada, and offering over 110,000 patient-friendly videos, images, brochures and interactive materials covering more than 5,600 medical topics.

Indeed, as we look towards meeting the future educational needs of our community, the library is excited to grow as a modern hub for healthcare learning and information.

We look forward to seeing you in our 25th year!