Community Health Fairs of Taipei Medical University Library (TMUL): promoting consumer health literacy and reading habits for University hospitals’ neighborhoods

Abstract

Background: Traditionally, the medical libraries in the University in Taiwan mainly support the learning, teaching, and research needs of their students and faculty. It has a certain distance from the general public in the community. In order to fulfill the society responsibility of the university and rise the good health and welfare of the neighborhoods, The TMUL launched the first community health fairs in Spring 2018.

Purpose: This poster reports the execution, content, feedback and future planning of our innovative community health fairs, hoping to serve as reference for other medical libraries.

Results: 12 consumer health book exhibitions and 11 health lectures were held cooperated with health-related festivals in the halls of our three university hospitals during the whole year, and in total, 1116 community residents attended our activities. Every attendant of the health fair can get a lucky bag with popular books and small souvenir from the TMUL. The feedback from the attendants were very good and the overall score of satisfaction is range from 4.2 to 4.65 in a five-point scale. They thought these programs were warm and touching, and very helpful to them. They wish the TMUL could continue to held Community Health Fairs in the future.

Conclusion: Due to the success, the University has decided to allocate the budget for the next year and the library will try to look for partners from the community. In the future, we will try to: 1.) Put BookCrossing bookcases in our three university hospitals, encouraging people to share their books. 2.) Cooperate with neighborhood public libraries, promoting their health related collection to the users. 3.) Invited bookstores to display their health topic books in our fairs, giving discount to attendants. 4.) Contact neighbor managers, outreaching our programs out of the university campus and our affiliate hospitals.