The Helsinki City Library provides services for its customers in hospitals and at service centers for senior citizens in many places around Helsinki. The library provides for its customers experience and information, which enhance their mental agility and in this way improve their quality of life and promote rehabilitation. Library services mean a great deal to those, who receive care or treatment in hospitals and institutions, since only the opening hours generate negative feedback.

Long-term customer relationships at service centers for senior citizens

The Helsinki City Library has service desks at all service centers for senior citizens in the city. The oldest of them is the service center at Kustaankartano, where separate premises contain the library services in the E building. The library is open for customers during three afternoons per week. In the mornings, library carts visit the wards at the home for the elderly serving customers, who cannot visit the library any longer.

Librarian Juhani Yliselä has been working at the Kustaankartano library for already 25 years. He knows his customers and their reading habits well. When he visits the wards with the book cart he needs to estimate what his customers would prefer, because the cart cannot fit at one time very many of the library’s 4,500 volumes. The majority of the material loaded in the book cart already has a possible reader in Yliselä’s mind.

Sauvo Puhtila, resident at the Kustaankartano home for the elderly, has always loved to read, but nowadays it is quite seldom he visits the library. However, during his library rounds Juhani Yliselä brings reading material to Puhtila that will meet Puhtila’s expectations. Sauvo Puhtila enjoys reading art and other non-fiction books as well as detective stories.

Sauvo Puhtila reads books in six languages.

Juhani Yliselä’s ward rounds are over for the day and the library is open for incoming customers.

Sponsors rescuing the hospital library network

The Helsinki City Library also provides services at the city hospitals. The hospital library network has been decreasing during the past years, for numerous patient libraries were closed down at the beginning of the year 2003. The objective was, nevertheless, to retain library services for children and patients needing psychiatric care.

The attempt to close down patient libraries received during that time lots of publicity, and due to it, the operation costs were paid by a private donator for the library at the Lapinlahti hospital that was, however, later closed down.

The patients at the HUS Children’s hospital have received library services sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s Finnish branch already since the year 2003. However, there are no designated premises for a customer library at the Children’s hospital; instead the staff of the library visits the wards with the book carts twice a week. The department director of the institution libraries Ria Ordén hopes that one day in the future the complete library would be more easily available for the customers. Part of the material is at hand in playrooms, the hospital school and waiting rooms.

Arbnora, who lives in Karjaa, becomes delighted when Ria Ordén visits her and selects something to read from the book cart. Ria Ordén offers to order some books in Albanian for the Albanian girl, but Arbnora assures that she gladly reads books in Finnish.

Ria Ordén makes sure that there are enough Moomin books in the cart.

Twelve-year-old Arbnora selected funny stories and some non-fiction books to read.

Individual and flexible services year after year

The library at the Rehabilitation Clinic on Hangonkatu street is one of the smallest institutional libraries of the Helsinki City Library. The treatment periods at the Rehabilitation clinic are relatively short so the customers change often and, therefore, the library does not need to be very extensive.

The library at the Rehabilitation Clinic on Hangonkatu street is open only during some hours per week. The Helsinki City library’s librarian is on duty on Mondays and Fridays at the library, but thanks to the staff at the Rehabilitation Clinic the library is also open on Wednesdays.

On his first day at the Rehabilitation Clinic, Juha is looking for something to read. The library visit is self-evident because Juha is an active library customer also in his daily life. Juha grabs his favourite Stephen King novel Pet Sematary off the shelf. Librarian Harri Liuksiala writes down the book Juha borrows by hand.

Juha is looking for thrillers.

Harri Liuksiala waits for more customers to arrive at the library.

Library customers do not need a library card in the hospitals and service centers for senior citizens. The material is usually borrowed with one’s name. The books can be returned either in the return boxes at the wards or to the librarians when they make their rounds in the wards. If you have not finished your book during your hospital stay, you can take it home with you, and you can return it to any HelMet library unit.

There were over 60,000 registered loans in the hospital and institution libraries in 2006.

• Hospital and institution libraries