Professor António Vaz Carneiro Chief Librarian of the FMUL

Interview with Professor António Vaz Carneiro, Chief Librarian of the FMUL

1. What, in your view, are the current aims and role of the FMUL CDI-Library? What would you say are its main challenges, goals and difficulties, etc.? 

The FMUL BC/CDI-Library has now, as it has always had – a fundamental role as an information source for clinical practice, teaching/training and research within CAML, the Lisbon Academic Medical Centre.
Our main challenges are to provide permanent access to a broad supply of updated relevant information – journals and books (during a period of severe budget cuts), software, etc. – as well as to train undergraduates and medical interns to research, select, critically evaluate and summarise medical information.

2. You were a guest speaker, a few days ago, at the 11th APDIS – the Portuguese Association of Health Documentation and Information Conference. This was a very interesting conference in which the present and future of health libraries locally and worldwide were addressed, featuring papers on state-of-the-art initiatives in this area, including health libraries in underdeveloped countries where they are just taking their first steps. It became abundantly clear that health libraries still play a vital role in terms of lending support to the training of young physicians, research and clinical practice by daily reinventing themselves so as to tackle upcoming challenges. Would you care to comment on this, Professor?

Good clinical practice nowadays – regardless of where it is conducted – relies on informed decisions in all medical areas: diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and so forth. It falls to health libraries to retrieve and make available relevant, reliable, and updated information conducive to health care quality. At the same time, libraries should also support teaching and research activities.

3.One of the crucial issues brought up in your paper was a reference to the fact that thousands of scientific articles in the health area that are highly relevant to clinical practice are published on a daily basis. However, it is not possible for physicians to read them all, since they have very little time to do so. Would you say that this is where media professionals might lend a helping hand?

Absolutely. Fortunately nowadays the so-called “secondary” and “previously assessed” sources of information select research papers according to quality and relevance criteria, critically reviewing their methods, results relevance and implementation, providing abstracts that render possible a quick and effective reading.

4.Nowadays, the CDI-Library, like other university libraries, clearly invests in the training of its users in terms of info literary competency development so as to make it possible for them to retrieve and tackle evidence-based information. To what extent do you regard these competencies as being relevant for future physicians and researchers?

These individual competencies are absolutely crucial if health professionals are to fully perform their tasks in the 21st century. The individual training of physicians and medical students should be a priority of health libraries with the ultimate goal of making them autonomous in terms of appropriate selection and use of evidence-based information. As such, health libraries will be playing their part in bringing the quality of healthcare to a high standard.