Importance of Including the Role of Clinical Medical Librarian in Library and Information Science Curriculum Development: A Review

Today Clinical Medical Librarianship fulfill many critical roles in the hospital setting by providing the correct information at the right time in a variety of ways to enhance the effectiveness in productivity of hospitals and medical staff. The other roles that have to play are optimize patient care, improve patient outcomes, and increase patient & family satisfaction about the services provided by the hospital. As Clinical Medical Librarians (CMLs) and their services provide an excellent return on investment for the hospital and help keeping its competitive edge, hospital staff should have access to the services of a professional librarian. The aim of this study is to use the findings from the literature to highlight the necessity of the Library and Information Science (LIS) curriculum to contain the role of the CML as well as the specialization course content of Clinical Medical Librarianship covering content distribution, learning protocol, and practical planning. Thus, the results of this study can be used as the basis for future developments in the Library and Information Science curriculum to provide a more appropriate and detailed curriculum that covers the required pedagogy on Clinical Librarianship. Relevant research articles published in 2000-2020 August were selected through a literature search. The 575 of those selected articles were further scrutinized for relevance and uniqueness. Then the three hundred twelve articles were selected for this study considering the relevance to emerging roles, professional settings, and contexts of CMLs. The importance of generating CMLs with the requisite skills, knowledge, and certifications is revealed by this study. As a result, it is suggested that a syllabus outlining the role of CML be added into the existing LIS curriculum in Sri Lanka. Further study recommended that the role of CML has evolved to meet the demands of healthcare now by taking their skills and expertise to the point of need and the role of CML appears to be an important member of the medical team, according to this study.