Dentists and dental hygienists in the public health sector across South Texas will benefit from a $25,000 award to the library at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio to improve access to the latest in oral health research.
The contract, awarded by the National Institutes of Health through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, will provide training in the use of dental health information resources, including PubMed®, Loansome Doc, MedlinePlus® and MedlinePlus en Espańol to dentists and dental hygienists working with the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District and the Gateway Clinic in Laredo.
The project, SMILE (Sharing Medline Plus/MEDLINE for Information Literacy Education), will also provide training for community health workers, also known as
promotores, affiliated with the Gateway Clinic.
Program focuses on dentists, dental hygienists in San Antonio and Laredo “Both Healthy People 2010 and Healthy Border 2010 include oral health objectives,” said Julie K. Gaines, community and technology liaison librarian at the Briscoe Library and the project’s director.
Established by the Office of Disease and Prevention and Health Promotion in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Healthy People 2010 is a nationwide health improvement initiative to increase the quality and years of healthy life for U.S. citizens, as well as to eliminate health disparities. Healthy Border 2010, an initiative of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, aims to improve health along both sides of the border by developing community health improvement plans.
“This project focuses on improving public health dental practitioners’ access to information resources, raising their awareness of resources available from the National Library of Medicine and integrating the best evidence from these resources as part of their practice.
“To achieve these goals, the library is taking advantage of existing relationships that the UT Health Science Center’s dental hygiene program and Dental School have with dental clinics in San Antonio and Laredo, and working to develop additional partnerships in both cities,” Gaines added.
New health information library in Laredo available to assist practitioners“In addition to fostering collaboration with public health practitioners in San Antonio, this project extends the library’s assistance to health care professionals in Laredo, where we have a new library facility,” said Keith Cogdill, Ph.D., the library’s director of South Texas Regional Information Services. The library at the Laredo Campus Extension is located in the new Academic Building, which was dedicated in October. The library is a source of health information for Laredo area health practitioners, health professions students at the Laredo Campus Extension and the general public.
Project builds on experience with promotores in Lower Rio Grande Valley“The project also builds on the library’s extensive experience with
promotores in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, especially training provided by staff at the Mario E. Ramirez, M.D., Library, located on the Regional Academic Health Center in Harlingen," Dr. Cogdill said.
The library, named in November for Dr. Ramirez, a former UT System Regent and vice president of the Health Science Center’s South Texas/border initiates, encompasses 11,000 square feet. It is the only state-of-the-art medical library in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and features a collection of 1,000 medical texts and access to the complete electronic resources of the Dolph Briscoe Jr. Library on the UT Health Science Center’s central campus in San Antonio.
Funds also to support development of oral health information on Web siteIn addition to training, the SMILE project will support the library’s development of oral health content on the
Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce public health Web portal, a national collaboration of U.S. government agencies, public health organizations and health sciences libraries.
###The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $576 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $15.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields.
The National Network of Libraries of Medicine is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine at NIH through five-year contracts awarded to eight health sciences libraries across the country. These eight serve as regional medical libraries, with the Houston Academy of Medicine ― Texas Medical Center Library in Houston serving as the regional medical library for the network’s South Central Region.
