This is the tale of a new library service that didn’t work quite as we’d planned, but taught us a lot along the way!

Just over a year ago the library service at South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare (a mental health and specialist services Trust) was approached by our Learning and Leadership Development  Lead about providing a search service for staff members seeking funding for educational purposes.  Various commercial databases were available but expensive, so we agreed to see if a librarian could find useful information by using their search skills.

We ran a pilot search service for 6 months, from December 2016 till June 2017.

The first step was to devise a search request form – a written reference interview.  The eligibility criteria for many funding sources were esoteric – dependent on being born in particular villages or having a parent in a particular profession.  Many awards were tied to potentially sensitive information, such as financial hardship or protected characteristics.  So we kept questions broad and let people decide how much information they wanted to tell us.

Over the six months we received eight requests for searches from five people.  We could have marketed the service more, but were hesitant without knowing how well we could carry out searches.  Most requests came from clinicians already qualified to first degree level, often beyond.

The searching was daunting at first – my main source of information was the internet, but I also used a printed directory and posted on LIS-MEDICAL to see if anyone else had done anything similar – responses suggested I wasn’t missing much and also made the connection with the Health Awards spreadsheet.  The nature of the searching (and general lack of success) made it hard to know when to stop.  However as time went on I developed a search process, a format for the results (including a ‘search record’ to show the sort of places I had searched, even if unsuccessfully!) and a list of useful websites.

I found some results for almost every search, but it was clear that most results were unlikely to be useful, usually because the funding sources were potentially open to a large number of people and were very limited in the number or value of awards available annually.  There were several funding sources that I included in several sets of search results, and I realised that doing this was making the chances of success for each individual even lower.  More funding sources seemed to be available for people with lower existing qualifications, people in financial hardship and people looking to carry out research rather than go on taught courses.

After six months we evaluated the search service through analysing search results  and an impact survey.  This only got two responses (from four search recipients still in the Trust).  Neither had used any funding sources suggested, one because of timing and the other because funding had become available from elsewhere.

The evaluation provided insufficient evidence to justify carrying on with the service, so instead we listed the most relevant funding sources on the library web pages.  This is updated twice yearly and sources found are also fed into the ‘Bursaries and Funding’ tab of the Healthcare Awards spreadsheet.

For further information, please see the pilot report.