ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

P28 - Visibility and status of the library in hospitals: the Rochester Study

The first medical libraries appeared in the century 15 with the development of small collections for the physician's study. In countries as USA and England are common, still today, the existence of medical libraries founded in the centuries 17 and 18. The U.S. federal legislation of October 4, 1966, determines, as a condition of qualification for provider agreements under Medicare, that the hospitals maintain a medical library, however that legal determination was eliminated definitively in 1986 by Health Care Financing Administration.  Based on this context this research has as objective shows, through literature revision, the evaluation of the level of impact of the Medical Library in agreement with Rochester Study that measured the impact of the Library on clinical decision making through research with doctors of fifteen hospitals in Rochester, NY and it ends with the reasons that can motivate the maintenance or not of libraries in hospitals in this time of cuts in health budgets and when many hospitals h ave their investments in information services questioned.