CEC 06
  July 5 Tuesday
  13.00-17.00

Aida Farha, have a BS in Pharmacy (American University of Beirut, graduate 1975) and she has been working as the ‘medical information specialist’ for the last 30 years at the American University of Beirut Saab Medical Library (which is an academic medical library). Her university degree in Pharmacy helped her better understand her job; and after that she realized the value of medical information retrieval skills especially in an age of evidence-based medicine, She was encouraged to learn more about it (attended a number of international courses and did lots of reading) and to teach it. She has given many classes at my institution, plus she gave a number of similar seminars/workshops in various Lebanese hospitals and universities, and also have given a number of such educational activities in many Arab countries and Cyprus.

The proposed course focuses on the scientific method to solve a problem by searching FREE reliable resources namely PubMed and the Internet. Nowadays, there are a lot of free reliable health resources that healthcare professionals (specially librarians) need to know where they are and how to best utilize them for their daily clinical practice. This course covers basic and advanced techniques for effective and efficient searching of the health literature. Also, it provides an introduction to Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), how to practice it, why should we do so and how to retrieve such information from the available free reliable literature. At the end it gives useful tips on effective Google searching.