Health Literacy and Surrey Libraries

We began looking at a Health Literacy plan for Surrey Libraries in the winter of 2009, after reviewing the work done by Richmond Public Library and Vancouver Coastal Health. To date, our health literacy plan has mostly involved building relationships with healthcare professionals, and expanding our collections in the area of Consumer Health, particularly at the new City Centre Library. Regarding the latter, we invested over $5000 in building on the existing health resources that transferred from the Whalley Library. This new Consumer Health collection focuses primarily on resources in the areas of mental wellness, addictions, and chronic conditions (diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, cancer, respiratory diseases, etc.).

While we continue to strengthen our Consumer Health resources, where we would like to improve is in the area of marketing these materials to the public and improving the health literacy of Surrey residents. “Searching for Health Information Online” classes have not been well attended in the past, so we are looking at new ways that we can educate our patrons about the materials, services and programs that we offer.

One of our goals is to develop stronger relationships with Fraserhealth and other health care agencies so that we can grow our opportunities for partnership in the area of health literacy. We currently partner with them to offer Babytimes at the Guildford Library which are hosted by a public health nurse. We also continue to host workshops with S.U.C.C.E.S.S. on a variety of health topics, and these sessions are well attended.

Through the BC Health Literacy and Public Libraries Network, we have developed contacts with various health professionals and literacy practitioners. One key relationship that grew out of the network was our partnership with Douglas College’s Nursing Program in January 2011. Surrey Libraries hosted 2 nursing students for their community based practicum from January to April 2011, and we hope to partner with them again in future.

Another area that we are working on is organizing and centralizing the different events going on at the library and in the broader community, so that our patrons can more easily find out about health related events of interest to them. Similarly, we are redesigning the Health & Wellness section of our website to make it more relevant and not just a long list of links.

Suppliers

Asian Publications (Surrey) for all  S. Asian languages

Tsai Fong Books (Texas) for Japanese, Vietnamese

Today’s Books (Burnaby) and Panmun (Korea) for Korean

Urdu Bazar  (Surrey) for Urdu

Continental books  (Colorado) for Spanish

Goethe Books  (Toronto) for German

Tania Tong orders Chinese and I always forget the suppliers, so check with her as Chinese is our largest collection

MiddleEast Bookstore (Montreal) for Arabic

Thiessen, Tanya [TDThiessen@surrey.ca]