Promotion of Nursing Books by the Operational Team at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals

Last year we spent a good chunk of our book budget on new nursing materials. As budgets have been reduced over the years, we have had to prioritise certain areas for updating stock. We weeded the area and found a number of out-of-date books so wanted to update this area. However, we also wanted bang for our buck! (or should I say book? Groan!) We wanted these books to be used and not languish on the shelves so we embarked on a heavy promotional campaign.

Who we contacted

We decided on a list of users to target, not just nurses but healthcare assistants, clinical educators and student nurses on placement from local universities. We have a great working relationship with our clinical educators and knew they’d be able to spread the word for us.

What we did

What didn’t we do more like! First up was utilising the Koha reading lists and creating a list specifically for new nursing stock. This meant that we could create a QR code which would link directly to the list so users could browse the collection. We then used the QR in our marketing materials.

We had promotional displays in our two libraries, using our main display areas at first and then during other promotional campaigns we moved these to our book end display units and rotated the stock every 6 weeks so the displays looked different and books had their chance to shine on display.

We sent promotional posters to wards and tailored the posters to show which would be relevant to the clinical activity of the ward and added the QR code to the rest of the stock too.

We did a specific display and posters of the Transforming Nursing Practice series of nursing books aimed at nursing students and sent the promotional poster to the clinical educators and added the new book information to the nursing induction packs and emailed it to the nursing students on our distribution lists.

We added it to our library newsletter and emailed the QR to all the nurses and contacts that we had (including the big cheeses). We asked our library champions to pass on the information, added it to promotional screens around the Trust, we sent a piece for the Trust communications bulletin, updated our website, posted it on social media especially on International Nursing Day etc. and updated our current awareness bulletins with the new stock.

So, did it work?

It did! Phew! From going through the stock titles, we had 104 issues and 217 renewals of books on the list. Total of issues and renewals was 321. Most books on the list had been issued at least once when I looked at the stats. Top performer was The Critically Reflective Practitioner.

What would we do differently?

It would have been good to use a QR code which monitors activity like QR Code Chimp so we could work out if people had scanned the QR and if it had an impact.

Some wards did not respond to our emails about sending posters so we printed them and put them in the internal post in the end. Maybe physically going to the wards and banging on doors might have been better.

I’m not sure if it increased the number of new users into the library, we had 197 new nursing memberships to the library, but I can’t say if this was due to the promotional campaign or if they would have joined anyway. Our nursing students are now taught off site so we didn’t see as many students as we had hoped.

I’m sure that most libraries do the same promotional activities we did, we didn’t reinvent the wheel here, but what I would say is that it was a long campaign over many months, and we kept drip feeding the message- reposting on social media, adding it regularly to our newsletters and Trust comms in the hope that it would be seen by different people each time.

It was a big operational team effort that paid off and gave a valuable insight on how to do it even better for our next big push.

Louisa Halton, Senior Library Assistant

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

3rd October 2025