In Middlesborough, people are eligible for housebound service when they
have difficulty accessing a Branch Library in person, and in carrying their
own loans home, and when there isn't a better alternative: eg . help from
friends or family, or using the Bookbus (which is intended to serve groups
of people in residencies or sheltered housing, although we have one
Housebound service out of our 12 "rounds" which consists almost entirely of
people in one care home. It just grew).
Numbers served vary between 250 and 300; currently 255, of which 77 were
nominated by our own staff, 46 by friends,32 by themselves and 29 by
family. Only 9 came from a social services source. Sources for the rest are
mostly unidentified.
We keep the data in an Access database, which means we have a permanent
survey which only needs tweaking when we have a question we haven't already
thought of. Most of the questions you might need answered are already there
in the initial needs assessment: location, age, sex, reading needs, reading
tastes, number of books required. Some of the older paper records were
incomplete, which accounts for the unidentified nominations.
Alan Sandham, Delivered Services Librarian, Middlesbrough Libraries &
Information
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