Hospital patient libraries and information services in Australia.

Abstract

In order to find out how many and what kind of Hospital Patient Libraries exist in Australia I placed a "Request for Information" on our national electronic discussion list entitled 'aliaHealth'. This discussion list has presently nearly 300 subscribers. Most of them are located in Australia, but they also come from Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The e-mail address for 'aliaHealth' is: aliaHealth@alianet.alia.org.au. The result of my enquiry was rather poor: there are three Hospital Patient Libraries in Western Australia, one in Queensland and two in Victoria. The criterion was that the Library or Patient Information Service had to be located within the Hospital grounds. The six Libraries or Information Services are described in detail.