On this page you will find information about our policies and performance.
Quality Standards
UKHSA Knowledge and Library Services aim to provide a high quality, efficient service and to meet your needs with courtesy.
In order to achieve this, we will:
Correspondence and enquiries
- Normally respond to enquiries within two days of receipt
Book and journal article requests
- Supply article requests from our own collection within two working days
- Process article requests for material held elsewhere within three working days
- Process book requests within one working day
- Update you on all requests taking longer than two weeks
Purchases and requests for purchase
- Acknowledge your suggestions for new book and journal titles within five working days
- Supply you with any resulting book purchases promptly
Literature searches
- Supply you with a bibliography in a minimum of one working week
- Supply you with an annotated bibliography in a minimum of two working weeks
- Supply you with an evidence briefing in a minimum of three working weeks
Please note exceptions to these standards might occur during periods of high service demand.
Would you like further information? A more detailed version of these standards, including definitions, explanations, exceptions and methods of audit, is available. Please contact us.
As part of the process of developing and implementing these standards, we invite you to give us your feedback on whether or not the standards above meet your needs. Please get in touch with any comments by emailing libraries@kls.ukhsa.gov.uk
View the Knowledge and Library Services Annual Review 2022/23 for an overview of activity data and feedback.
Service metrics
We collect data in order to monitor our service activity, quality and performance on a monthly basis.
The data are presented in a dashboard format, as below.
Service activity dashboard enables you to see over a calendar-month period:
- no. of unique enquiries received via email to libraries@kls.ukhsa.gov.uk or by telephone 020 368 20600
- no. of document delivery (article requests, etc.) supplied and received
- no. of literature search requests received
- no. of KLS team hours spent literature searching
Past Service Metrics
Quality standards dashboard uses simple visual symbols to enable you to see:
- Standards we are exceeding
- Standards we are meeting
- Standards we are not achieving
- How our performance has changed since the previous month
- Overall performance to date for this year
We know that statistics and standards form one aspect an overall picture of part of service delivery and performance, along with other indicators such as customer satisfaction and value and impact. UKHSA KLS are working to develop our value and impact measures – you can see case studies demonstrating the impact of our mediated literature searches on our impact stories page.
Policies
