In September 2007, the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Cairo, in collaboration with Headquarters (WHO/HQ) in Geneva and the WHO Representative in Amman, had the honor of providing 50 units of the Mobile Health Library which is based on Blue Trunk Library (BTL) to the Government of Jordan.

The philosophy of the Mobile Health Library is to reach out to remote areas and isolated health care facilities to provide them and their health workers with updated information. Health information is believed to be one essential element for provision of better health and can contribute to the improvement of the quality of human resources in health.

The Mobile Health Library manufactured in EMRO is a wooden trunk 1.25 m high, 66 cm wide and 37 cm deep. It contains three racks, each of which contains five cartons, holding an approximate number of 100 selected health publications and documents.

Originally, the BTL collection divided into 14 topics, is selected to serve medical staff working in remote areas such as villages, desert areas and centres away from the big cities, where medical information is not readily available. Example of these topics include “Community Health”, “Primary Health Care”, “Maternal Health and Family Planning”, “Child Health”, “Communicable Diseases and Vaccination”, “Nutrition and Nutritional Disorders”, etc.

In this case, the aim was to distribute 50 BTLs to 25 Governmental “Hospitals” in Jordan. Therefore, the selection of publications was modified so as to cope with the needs of medical teams working in hospitals.

Two sets of the Mobile Health Library were prepared to be installed in each hospital:

- one containing 77 WHO/HQ English publications, and

- the other one containing 48 WHO/EMRO Arabic and 71 WHO/EMRO English publications.

The total number of publications included in the 25 HQ/BTLs is 1925.

Total number of publications included in the 25 EMRO/BTLs is 2975.

( 1200 in Arabic and 1775 in English).

The total number of publications donated through the 50 BTLs is 4900 publications in English and Arabic.

The total cost of these 50 BTLs including dispatch from Cairo to Jordan, publications, wooden trunks, labels and cartons, is $ 67,467. The following table shows details cost of each item:

A Mobile Health Library could be the core of a larger library, one that is rich, complete, modern and useful. Recent publications may be added, relevant to the interest of the medical team (medical doctors, as well as nurses, laboratory workers, etc.). This will depend on the personal enthusiasm and initiative of the persons who will have the chance to use it, or the person who will be in charge of it, as well as on these persons’ belief in the importance and the utility of the information made available through this project.