Partnering for accreditation: Librarians helping meet the information needs of the Public Health Accreditation Board standards

The Public Health Accreditation Board's new accreditation competency #10 focuses on finding and using evidence in the planning of processes, programs and interventions. Whether or not this has been standard operating procedure in your organization, new tools and resources and new methods of accessing them make this fertile ground for in-service CE and presentations at state or local professional meetings. This poster uses information gathered from librarians who have attended the APHA annual meeting over the past ten years to indicate the types of teaching/learning experiences and venues that have been used and the audiences that have benefited from public health directors and practitioners engaging librarians for updates and trainings on information sources and their access. As the corpus of public health evidence grows, public health educators face increasing responsibility to refer students to quality sources and researchers to refer to them in their own work. Your local librarian—particularly one who has attended state or national public health association meetings—either has a finger on quality, reliable resources or has methods of getting that information and sharing it with you. Based on this research, librarian engagement with public health professionals helps agencies and institutions meet and exceed accreditation standards, facilitates students and researchers in locating quality sources, and holds the possibility of identifying more cost-effective and productive services grounded in scientific evidence.