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MS. AIDA FARHA: Okay, thank you for inviting me here today. My name is Aida Farha. I'm
the information specialist at the Saab Medical Library, American University of Beirut, and
this is located in Lebanon. I'm very much enthusiastic about teaching users how to look
for information, and when I say "users," I especially mean the physicians. This is what
I do most of the time at work, and I do it with pleasure and enthusiasm, because I believe
that we, as medical librarians, we save lives, patient's lives, we save healthcare professional's
time, and we save healthcare costs.
And many cases have happened to me personally that prove these situations. For example,
I can tell you one instance that has happened some time ago. I was teaching physicians in
a neighborhood country, and after eight months I received a phone call from one of the attendees
and physician, and he was thanking me for saving his life. He said that before attending
the session that I gave, he thought that he knew how to look for health or medical information,
but after attending my session, he found out that actually he didn't know how to do that,
and this is very common among physicians, I'm sure, allover the world.
Later, he got some type of disease, which lS quite rare. So, he went to a specialist,
another physician that specializes for that particular disease, and he couldn't treat
him. So, he remembered the way that I have taught him how to look for medical information
using evidence-based medicine tools, and he searched himself for the information, and
that's how he saved his life, and he was just calling me to say, "Thank you, you have saved
my life."
The thing that has happened is that when I teach physicians, I always think that at the
end there is a patient that they are going to save. It could be me, some of my family,
my friends, people around me, but I never thought that physicians, they do also become
patients, and what I teach could save their lives too. Thank you very much. Thank you
for Elsevier.