New roles and new challenges

The health sector never remains static. New drugs are developed, new illnesses appear and governments tinker with health service delivery to meet their political agendas. The information needs of health consumers, health professionals and health students evolve and modify. As some library and information services no longer meet users’ needs new services appear to meet emerging new demands. This chapter revisits those areas (health service, technologies, user needs, information provider roles and consumer requirements) explored in a corresponding chapter in this book’s companion volume (Booth and Walton, 2000) and proposes how these may develop. The chapter concludes with a prospective glance at the likely impact of evidence based information practice on the domains covered by this book.