Vital Views

Music 0:20
Music.

Minnie Wood 0:31
Welcome to another episode of vital views, a podcast by UNLV School of Nursing. My name is Minnie wood, and I'm a senior lecturer at the school. Today, we're joined by two special guests from the library district, Rebecca Colbert, who is the head of collections and bibliographic services, and Theron Nissen, the branch manager at the windmill library. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for being here with us today.

Both 0:55
Thank you and for inviting us. Thank you. It's a pleasure. So let's

Minnie Wood 0:59
start. Can you tell us a little bit about your roles at the library district? Rebecca, let's start with you

Rebecca Colbert 1:05
Sure. I realize that title is a mouthful. What is collections and bibliographic services? I manage the department that purchases, selects and purchases all the material that you go into the library and check out. So if there is a book or a toy or a museum pass that you took home with your library card. It is because my department of librarians selected it, paid for it, cataloged it, made it available to view in the system and put it on the shelf for you. Yeah, not just books, not just books. We have so much more. We have DVDs and music. One of our most recent additions as video games very popular, and this year, we're adding a library of things which will be high interest, high demand, consumer items, which I think will also be really well received.

Minnie Wood 1:50
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Theron, tell us a little bit about your role at the library district. Well,

Theron Nissen 1:55
I am the Branch Manager of the windmill libraries. The quick overview as I make sure the library is running smoothly, that staff has the tools they need to meet our customers demands. We also want to find out what the customers need. We try to keep up a positive outgoing relationship with our customers and our community. I do all the back office, administration, administrative tasks, money, budget, supplies. But I also, when needed, I show books, I clean up water spilled on the floor, I throw out diapers that have been left in the book area. So I pretty much do A to Z in the branch, whatever

Minnie Wood 2:34
it takes, whatever it takes. Wonderful. Thank you both so much. I'd like to talk a little bit about how our worlds have connected recently, and it all started with the health kits that were introduced to all library branches over the summer. So can you tell us a little bit more about the health kits, including how patrons can find them and why you decided to offer them?

Rebecca Colbert 2:55
Well, sure, there's, there's actually a little history with this health kit project. Back in 2020 during the COVID shutdown, we really wanted to put health kits out there on the shelves, in people's hands, and we had difficulty both acquiring the materials for them, because everybody and their brother wanted a pulse oximeter. Back then, when we were all had COVID again and again, and we didn't feel like it was a good way to take resources away from people who might need it, like hospitals, doctors offices, and we didn't have the funding at that time. Then last year, a community partner stepped forward with a community health grant, and we decided this was a perfect time. And how many small, portable, circulatable items. You know, they have to be kind of durable if you're putting them in the public's hands. And at first we were just going to do the pulse oximeters that measure your blood oxygen level. Those are very small and easy to lose, but if you put it in a box with a touchless thermometer, which is beautiful, because we don't have to sanitize it in quite the same way, and we don't have to worry about someone putting it in their mouth. We don't want that. And then we added a wrist blood pressure cuff, and so that together in one box as a kit, was sort of our dream, and it's been really, really popular. People don't know about this type of health equipment. Everybody gets their blood pressure checked at the doctor. I didn't know about pulse oximeters until I had kids and they had asthma. And of course, I had one at home, and then I discovered all the other asthma moms had that at home, and how many other people wanted this but didn't have it because it cost like $60 at Walgreens. And so anytime we can take something that would be hopefully temporarily needed at home. They want to check it out and see if this is a useful tool to help them, you know, measure their own health statistics, and then decide, okay, I need to invest in this or Okay, I got through this crisis. I understand how this works. So we took the Community Health grant. Money, put together 100 kits and put them in all 25 of our library branches, that is amazing. They've been extremely popular. Things happen when you lend materials to the public. A lot of times, things don't come back. These have had about, I'd say about 25% have wandered away, and they're in the process of getting billed or sending nasty grams saying, Hey, you owe us our health kit back. But the other 75% they do circulate. They do circulate. Well, they only check out for seven days because we wanted the turnover and the availability to be there. So normally, our books are 21 day checkouts, but with a seven day checkout, you've got just enough time, if you're not feeling well, to kind of monitor your symptoms, and then if you need to pay attention to your blood pressure for more than a week, you probably need the care of a physician anyhow. So this is just a snapshot for people. It's a way to to get a baseline metric. How do they feel, what do those readings look like, and maybe learn a lot about their own health? I will say there was great debate, as there always is, when we introduce something new at the library, we cannot give advice, not medical, not legal. Oh, there's a third, not financial. And so as librarians, we can only connect people to the information. And when UNLV School of Nursing contacted us and said, Hey, we can probably help here. We can maybe advise people what their ranges should be for blood pressure, that was a hallelujah moment for us, because we were afraid to do that kind of information ourselves. We are not health professionals. We are just connecting folks to resources. So since the kits went out over the summer, we've inserted this card that the UNLV School of Nursing created for us that helps folks know, are they in the danger zone? Should they pay attention to these levels? It's it's a fantastic partnership, and we're so grateful. Yeah,

Minnie Wood 7:00
it's just such a wonderful resource for the community. I'm so excited when you talk about those numbers and how the kits are in every library in our region. I just, I'm so excited by that, and absolutely the I think for you know, people can't see we're on a podcast here today, but if you were to see the health kit, you would see that the card that's inserted, that was prepared by the School of Nursing, provides parameters for the different measurements that the customer or the library visitor will check using the no touch, the touchless thermometer, using the wrist blood pressure monitor and the pulse oximeter, and they're color coded so that you can see what might be in a green zone or a caution yellow zone or a red zone, and when you might want to go see your clinician. And actually, we were really so happy recently to be able to visit one of the libraries with a group of my community nursing students to demonstrate how the kits should be used. So we were able to take it, take the pieces out, sort of demonstrate them. And for us, you know, just this partnership is it's so valuable, and we feel so good about being able to contribute to the work that you're doing at the library district, our community, nursing students, part of what their you know our objectives are in teaching them is learning that nursing is not just about care that happens out in the hospitals in our acute care settings, but also in our neighborhoods and in the places where people live, work and play, and the libraries are an essential part of that. And so having equipment available to people that they might not otherwise be able to purchase, especially because of things like what we call the social determinants of health, your economics, maybe your level of education, et cetera, this is just a wonderful access point for just increasing awareness, health literacy and all of that. So I just think it's fabulous.

Rebecca Colbert 9:05
That's the word I was reaching for. Was health literacy, because the card is both in English and Spanish. The equipment is one touch working. You literally one button, and you get a reading on all three of the devices included. The idea is to make it simple, easy to use, not intimidating. So many people who don't have access to quality health care or any health care are very intimidated by taking their blood pressure reading. And I'm sure that you have physicians that could tell you time and again, everyone who comes in and is diagnosed with hypertension is shocked. They had no idea how high their blood pressure is, been there, done that, and now I have a wrist cuff at home, yes,

Minnie Wood 9:45
yes. And that's why we call hypertension, or high blood pressure. The Silent Killer, you know, is that you may be walking around with a high blood pressure and not be aware of it. And you know, the pulse oximeter really useful, especially at. This time of the year, as you mentioned, it measures the level of oxygen in the blood through just by putting it a sensor on your finger. And so when we're in respiratory virus season, we've got lots of colds and flus and, of course, COVID 19, RSV, there's a lot going around. And so that can really help people get a sense of when to get some further help, absolutely,

Rebecca Colbert 10:26
and that's that's our goal, is to empower, inform, educate, make it easy. And the fact that someone can go into a library where they're probably there to pick up a movie and also get vital information about their own health, that's a godsend.

Minnie Wood 10:40
Yeah, so Rebecca, how easy is it? What does somebody have to do to come in and take out a health kit? So

Rebecca Colbert 10:44
if they have a library card, it's just that easy. Generally, they are held at the information desk of the library in question. They can put a request on it, they can place a hold and go pick it up. But generally, you walk in and ask for a health kit at the information desk, and you go home with it that day for a week. There's nothing special if you don't have a library card, come in with identification proof of address, hopefully you have proof of local address. If you don't, if you haven't changed over leases or bills yet, come in with your out of state address proof, and we'll still hook you up with a library card, and you can still take a health kit home that day.

Minnie Wood 11:22
It's fabulous. You're the pinnacle of accessibility. It's wonderful. So, so we've we've talked about the health kits. I want to learn a little bit more about what the library offers, specifically, some information about the medical models offered at the windmill library. Theron. Can you please share a little bit more about

Theron Nissen 11:42
that? Absolutely. So currently at windmill, we have a the full skeletal model. We have a heart, a brain, torso. I got that the idea from, well, I knew they existed, but I would see many of our customers studying, and they're wearing scrubs, and I went to college, so I figured they're probably some doing something in the medical field. So just talking to them, see what they're doing. What do they need? What can we do? We as the library, we're always trying to meet the needs of our customers. One thing people did ask was for for models. I know there's tons of models. I contacted the CSN library. I know that they had a very large medical model collection. Try to find out what the most popular and what models were most in demand. So we got some of those, made those available to the public. Anyone can use them. You can't take them home. You do have to check them out. So you do have to have a library card or some type of IDs to have used to it for it. But they're very popular, especially the skeleton. It isn't just medical students. We keep them. We have a single point of service desk in our library that adults and kids come for their informational needs. We have our medical models there, and that always, quite often, strikes up a conversation between the child and the parent. Quite often, the parent will take the model with the child, explain the body. I mean, that's a good introduction. Your first teacher should be your parent, and so that's, I think that's a good relationship. Helps, helps with some some bonding there. And you always want to look up to your parents. They know everything when you're that age. I love it. I love it. And it's the school. There's a Southwest Tech right down the street from us. They have a medical program or health program, so we also bought that with the idea of trying to support those students. And

Minnie Wood 13:49
great. So we've got we've got kids and families getting greater awareness of the human body through these models. And it sounds like you're seeing a lot of pre or current health profession students when you've been talking to people who are studying in the library, Have you learned anything about what professions those those study years are going into? You hear met you mentioned medicine, nursing as well. What are you hearing? It's

Theron Nissen 14:13
it's mainly nursing. What it is? Have you been people just wanted to take some of this to sketch, to draw, but it's overwhelmingly nursing students. And then we also have a very good, I'll call it a supplement to the models. We have a ve program on some of our computers.

Minnie Wood 14:35
Is this the z space computer? Yes. Z space

Theron Nissen 14:40
is a company who provided 3d applications that are used on the computer. We have have some of their applications. One of them is the human anatomy application, and it's has over 4600 anatomical models. These systems. It covers the whole body, from head to toe, D model. You can manipulate the models. You can look at the body as a whole. Take apart the system. Build it. Build the system. Look, look through a system. It lets you do things that are kind of impossible. I mean, you can, you know, look through a beating heart. See how it's working. Sometimes you can, depending on the system you're using. You know, it's going to show you how that works. For example, you can see them off the muscles in the arms and the tendons moving how they function. It's, it's just blew me away when I when I first saw it. It's available in, I think, like, six languages. So if English isn't your first language, if you're more comfortable learning in Spanish, you can switch it over to everything to Spanish. It talks about pathologies of different systems. There's for someone like me. Well, how do I say that? Don't tell me how to pronounce certain medical parts of it

Minnie Wood 15:56
amazing. And a lot of anatomy resources, traditionally, are just flat on a piece of paper, right, or in a book, so the fact that they can be manipulated, and you can see movement, I mean, it just sounds like a wonderful educational tool.

Theron Nissen 16:09
It is, please, please come down to one of the libraries who has it? It's, you don't need to there's no goggles or special anything that you have to wear.

Minnie Wood 16:20
You mentioned the southwest, Southwest Tech, is it, yeah, high school down the street. Can you tell us a little bit more about how those nursing students are used, utilizing the the models, or are they, to my

Theron Nissen 16:32
knowledge, they are. When we first got our z space machines, we tried to mirror whatever they had. So if they were using it in school, they could come to the library and use it as well. That's a

Minnie Wood 16:45
great partnership.

Rebecca Colbert 16:46
And I know I have a student over at Southwest Tech, and I've learned that the curriculum, particularly in nursing, is very standardized. So each year there's a program of study, and one of their I believe junior year classes is probably anatomy and physiology. And those are the kids that you see using z space,

Minnie Wood 17:04
wonderful, wonderful.

Theron Nissen 17:06
And it's also, can just be used as career explorer. I mean, if you want to find out what's involved, did you

Minnie Wood 17:13
say a career explorer?

Theron Nissen 17:17
It's also, I think, it makes available to people who, again, you know, who don't have access. So it is available in lot of a lot of the public schools. We do have a big home school population here in Las Vegas. Why shouldn't they have access to the good technology, cutting edge technology, as well?

Minnie Wood 17:34
Absolutely, it's absolutely wonderful. I love it. Was there anything else you wanted to share about the health kits maybe we missed, or you know about the resources available at the library related to health

Rebecca Colbert 17:48
sure, once you come in and take a look at our shelves, or say you're online from home and you don't feel good and you can't come in, you'd love a health kit, but right now, you're Playing Dr Google. If you go on our website, librarydistrict.org, you can find all kinds of electronic resources. We actually have Medline available for consumers. We try to avoid over commercialized information. We want to be very neutral, very standard. These are your symptoms. This is what it might mean. This is what you should do. And so a resource like Medline that you can access from your your phone or your tablet at home is really great. We have a lot of ebooks in those popular non fiction areas, most of our customers come in within a mind towards wellness. How do I prevent aging? How do I keep healthy, as opposed to, how do I get well after I'm sick? They really are focused with aging and healthy nutrition and healthy living, and so we have 1000s of books and ebooks in that subject area as well. Great

Minnie Wood 18:57
resources for the community. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you both here on the show. Thank you so much for being here on vital views, and thank you to the audience for tuning in for another episode of vital views.

Both 19:11
Thanks so much. Thank you.

Music 19:12
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