Taking action on your feedback

November saw the annual opportunity for you to comment on our services via a quick survey. Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome but the survey provides us with a handy snapshot of opinion.

We received over a hundred responses from a range of hospital and PCT staff and a good number from students on placement. Overall satisfaction levels remain high with over 90% of respondents rating the overall service as Good or Very good (up from 80% last time). Staff and the assistance they provide to find the information you need are rated particularly highly.


Satisfaction with opening hours has risen which is interesting given the period of reduced hours this year while we recruited a new team member - perhaps people were just happy to get our usual hours back? We are open longer hours than you may realise - 8:30 am to 7 pm Monday and Tuesday and 8:30 am to 5 pm Wednesday to Friday (46.5 hours in total!). In addition the Cyber Room is available 24 hours a day seven days a week to all staff with a proximity lock ID badge. The Cyber Room is equipped with 7 PCs and a selection of core books for reference use. For all satisfaction levels had risen there continued to be a high level of comments asking for longer hours. We plan to address this shortly by making the Reading Room opposite the library into a 24 hour space.

The level of satisfaction with training was improved - reflecting the improved provision of opportunities in this area. We will be making further developments to our offerings in this area over the next year.

We received a number of requests for more paper journals. It is highly unlikely that we will be able to subscribe to new paper titles - certainly not without reductions in other areas of the collection. However - we continue to increase the number of electronic titles available and anticipate that over the next few years the majority of titles will take this form. The best way to see if we have a journal is via MyJournals - remember you need to login with your Athens details to see everything.


The rating for the book collection has improved since last time. However there were still comments that we lack current editions. I think two main reasons can be identified for this. Firstly items may be on loan. The very latest books are those most in demand so a scan of the shelves should be supplemented by checking NewhamCat to see if someone else has the item you require. Secondly we might not have been told what you need. You can help us to help you by bringing in any reading lists you are issued, showing us interesting reviews or simply by suggesting titles. We nearly always buy recommended titles.

A number of comments were received regarding noise levels in the library. This is a long standing issue and hard to address. Larger libraries tend to be zoned to keep noisy activities - photocopying, interactions with staff, small group working and so on - away from quiet study areas. We will always struggle to separate these things out. As mentioned with regard to opening hours we are redeveloping the Reading Room opposite the main library. The intention is that this space should be equipped to support small group study and hopefully we can push some of the noise into this new area.

A new question this time was around how the information you had received made a difference to your work or study. We had some great responses to this and I'll close this post by sharing a couple.

“I've mainly used the library for requesting journal articles or information that relates to patients' treatment programmes. The articles/information always arrive quickly which makes treatment planning easier and faster.”

“Your selection of books is actually more impressive than similar larger institutions which may have more of a particular book but lacks the quality of books to support health professionals in running a first class NHS”

“I have found out a lot of relevant info through the knowledge alerts which I otherwise wouldn’t have known about”

(C) Image Creative Commons