Barnes–Jewish College Library Director Renee Gorrell on the power of nurses

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This week’s Making Rounds features Renee Gorrell, the library and information services director at the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes–Jewish College, where she helps nursing students conduct research using the St. Louis college’s online library.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you briefly explain what you do?

I’m the library director at the Goldfarb School of Nursing. We have a student population of around 550. Those are undergraduates, master’s degree, and doctoral students.

Our library here is 100% online—we have over 10,000 full-text scholarly journals in healthcare and over 100,000 full-text books. It’s weird; we’re almost totally virtual and online. I think some of the college administration would love to make me into a hologram, but so far, I’m still flesh and blood.

What do you find most fulfilling about your job?

I love being a librarian. So many people say that’s such an old-fashioned term—and maybe it is. One of our past deans wanted to change my job title to a “bioinformaticist.” And I said to him, “Why would I want to be something that I can’t even say?”

I love being this type of librarian and helping so many people that hopefully are going to be really, really smart when it comes time to help me in the hospital.

What’s a common misconception about your job?

We don’t use the Dewey decimal system. We use the National Library of Medicine system.

Working with all these healthcare workers-to-be, do you think the people of the healthcare industry are changing?

Yes, I think healthcare workers are shifting in a certain direction, I think especially for nursing. In our country, nursing used to be just kind of the physicians’ helpers. But now, nurses are really many times the patient’s not only, but it’s their most point of contact.

They’re communicating with their patients. They’re trying to make their patients comfortable plus doing a lot of the healthcare items: taking vitals, etc. They’re just constantly there, you know, the nurses station. They’re on call constantly. And there’s a smile on every one of their faces. And I’ve often wondered, “How do you do this? How do you put up with some of those patients?” Because when a patient is in the hospital, they’re not going to be in a good mood. They’re going to be cranky, or in pain, or whatever. But those nurses are there to comfort, and to take care, and to help heal. And they do it all.