Fleary Sasha A, Joseph Patrece L, Rastogi Somya, Fenton Tienna, Srivastava Venya
City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health, City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
J Community Health. 2025 Apr;50(2):317-334. doi: 10.1007/s10900-024-01403-z. Epub 2024 Nov 3.
A health space is any physical, social, or virtual space that supports building health literacy skills, promotes health behavior, preventive health, and wellbeing, or provides health care, health information, or health or social services. To move the needle on health, especially preventive health, a focus on non-traditional health spaces is critical. Libraries serve various community needs such as food distribution, health literacy, education, immunization, and health screenings. This study explores the extent to which libraries are equipped to function as a health space. A convergent mixed-methods approach was utilized; 234 library personnel were randomly recruited using data from the 2017 Public Libraries Survey to complete a survey and 24 semi-structured follow-up interviews were conducted. Our findings support that libraries function as a health space in multiple ways including providing important health and social programming and services to patrons. They help meet patron's health information needs by leveraging the expertise of community partners and incorporating valuable input from patrons in programming decisions. However, the capacity of libraries to carry out these health initiatives varies, in particular due to limited staff expertise in health-related topics and structural issues (e.g., funding). Our research emphasizes the need to integrate organizational health literacy attributes into library operations, specifically by (1) streamlining strategic partnerships with community experts in libraries in high-need areas to extend their limited resources, and (2) incorporating health literacy into missions and operations to draw necessary financial and personnel support to overcome salient challenges (i.e., funding and staff training).
健康空间是指任何支持培养健康素养技能、促进健康行为、预防保健和福祉，或提供医疗保健、健康信息或健康或社会服务的物理、社会或虚拟空间。为了推动健康事业发展，尤其是预防保健，关注非传统健康空间至关重要。图书馆满足各种社区需求，如食品分发、健康素养、教育、免疫接种和健康筛查。本研究探讨了图书馆具备作为健康空间发挥作用的程度。采用了收敛性混合方法；利用2017年公共图书馆调查的数据随机招募了234名图书馆工作人员来完成一项调查，并进行了24次半结构化后续访谈。我们的研究结果支持图书馆以多种方式发挥健康空间的作用，包括为读者提供重要的健康和社会项目及服务。它们通过利用社区合作伙伴的专业知识，并在项目决策中纳入读者的宝贵意见，帮助满足读者的健康信息需求。然而，图书馆开展这些健康倡议的能力各不相同，特别是由于在健康相关主题方面工作人员专业知识有限以及存在结构问题（如资金）。我们的研究强调需要将组织健康素养属性融入图书馆运营，具体做法是：（1）简化与高需求地区图书馆社区专家的战略伙伴关系，以扩展其有限资源；（2）将健康素养纳入使命和运营，以获得必要的财政和人员支持，从而克服突出挑战（即资金和人员培训）。
