13th EAHIL Conference
Health Information Without Frontiers
4 – 6 July 

Located at the heart of Europe, Brussels hosted another EAHIL – European Association of Health Information Libraries - conference, whose theme was: Health Information Without Frontiers. This was a special year for the organization as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.

As the capital of the European Union, Brussels was the ideal setting for an event that was meant to have no boundaries, reinforcing the objectives of EAHIL. The event was attended by professionals from 33 countries, mostly European, but also from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, and the United States, who had the opportunity to share experiences and above all acquire new knowledge, make new contacts and establish partnerships that are critical to enhance the services provided by Health Libraries towards excellence and user satisfaction.

The conference was held at the Catholic University of Louvain, and the scientific programmescientific programme was of high quality, focusing on Information Literacy, Health Literacy and on Evidence Based Medicine.

This year, the participation of the Library-IDC of FMUL was particularly supported by EAHIL, which honoured us by awarding a grant to colleague Susana Henriques, who gave a talk on :  “Information Literacy – User Training Project for the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon – FMUL”, and presented a poster:“Lisbon Faculty of Medicine Library on the route to Quality: using the “Lisbon Faculty of Medicine Library on the route to Quality: using the “Common Assessment Framework (CAF) as a challenge for improving our services” authored by  Emília Clamote.

Of all the contacts made, the interest expressed by colleague Ann Meulemeester, of the Biomedical Library of the University of Ghent stands out, as this library is conducting work similar to ours regarding the training of users. We may develop a joint project to assess the educational role of training programmes in the development of information literacy skills and in supporting the management of the learning process developed by academic libraries.

From another perspective, the manager of the Healthaware , project, Dr Bonnie Heim, from the Library of the Health Statistics Centre in Queensland - Australia contacted us with a view to making the collecting and sharing of Portuguese health data available for international dissemination.

Once more, the participation of the Library-IDC proved beneficial and rewarding at a unique period for international libraries specializing in health. It gave us the opportunity to promote our image and services and proved to be an excellent occasion to acquire new skills. It is equally extremely motivating to see that the work conducted by our team is at the forefront of work carried out by our international counterparts.
Susana Henriques
Divisão de Biblioteca e Informação
susanahenriques@fm.ul.pt