Education India Project #14455

Building Better Doctors, With Vital Search Skills

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Building Better Doctors, With Vital Search Skills

Project Report | Mar 31, 2025
QMed completes utilization of its first Grant

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

In India, we are at the end of another Financial year of not having made ends meet. This is very challenging for not for profits. But we strive on! And we trust that people WILL support us financially to take things ahead. Individual giving is one of our sources of income for sustenance

In the coming financial year, we hope that the bodies like the National Medical Commission, the Dental Council of India and more will make our courses mandatory. If only they do this, then with every institution subscribing, we will have the finances to put in much more into our projects than we are able to now and make a huge change in the country!

March has been a busy month with two workshops and three lectures. We finished the last two workshops with the first ever grant money we received from Pfizer in 2023. These two were at the Tata Memorial Hospital and the Seth GSMC & KEM Hospital. A slightly disappointing part was that at both venues, while about 35 registered, we had far less that actually attended. In medical institutions sometimes other emergencies make this happen and it was sad that it happened in both these institutions.

Of course those who came, made it up with 100% enthusiastic participation and encouraged others who missed, to learn from our ELearning courses.

We also had two lectures at the YMT Ayurvedic college and one webinar for the ML Dhawale Memorial Homeopathic College. I must confess that I miss the interactions that happen in live events, when I speak over a webinar session. But for institutions, it is sometimes more effective to plan for webinars rather than live events.

Do wish us the best for the new Finanial Year. And as always - do keep donating for our large cause!

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Mar 3, 2025
A workshop where it matters! - Where research is for the rural public health!

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

Participants at SEARCH - solving exercises

After 12 long years, I visited SEARCH, Gadchiroli - this time to conduct a one day workshop on PubMed & Zotero. My earlier visit in 2012, was to explore SEARCH, spend time there, and understand if QMed could help them in any way. I spent a full week and had written some blog posts on my personal blog (which I am afraid I have not kept updated later). But the posts I wrote then are descriptive and interesting :)

This time my workshop was on the 27th of February. I reached there on the 26th and left on the 28th morning. On the 27th, we had around 15 people attend the workshop. The audience had a mix of young doctors, public health researchers and a Statistician, Mr Mahesh who has been with SEARCH for years. I met him last time too and was impressed with all his committed work!

To my delight Dr Abhay - the Founder of SEARCH - himself was present to inaugurate the event. He exchanged a few words with me and introduced me to the audience, after we did a brief lamp lighting ceremony. He then requested all participants to make the best use of the workshop.

The group was extremely committed. They seemed to be on the edge of their chairs all the time - waiting to absorb every input. They participated a 100% - answering questions, solving problems that I set, and more

Ms Roshni was the coordinator for this workshop and did all that she could to make my trip comfortable and memorable. At the end of the workshop - she told the others the most important thing. She said "we are aiming to increase our publications - so that we share our research findings across"! And I thought - if this was an organization that had brought down infant mortality by a whopping 72% - after their founders moved in there, they definitely did need to share how they worked, how they carried out public health research, and more!

At the end of the day, I got to meet Dr Abhay and his gracious wife and co-Founder, Dr Rani once again, after the daily prayer meeting. Dr Rani told me that she remembered my last visit very well. I was very happy to hear that - considering that they have varied visitors on a pretty regular basis. We had a brief chat and they told me that I was welcome to visit more often.

SEARCH is really a place for a quiet "getaway" from cities and stresses. You only hear birds out there! For me it was the perfect combination of a lovely break plus doing what I love doing!

With Dr Abhay - the Founder

With the enthusiastic Dr Roshni - Prog Coord

The gloious SEARCH Campus

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Feb 20, 2025
One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

A recent initiative by the Govt of India - "One Nation One Subscription" (ONOS) has created a buzz amongst the academic community in India. This initiative is geared towards enhancing research in all fields. This is about providing access to over 13000 journals from 30 reputed publishers, to academic institutions in India.

Launched in Jan 2025, it currently is for government supported institutions. In the coming years, access will be provided to a bigger network of institutions. All details are available in the website - https://www.onos.gov.in/

Recently I was invited to be a panelist on this topic at an event held in the Dr DY Patil University, in my city of Mumbai. The librarian from their "Centre of Excellence", Dr Padma planned a great session. She organized a panel discussion between four librarians, and also had invited another senior librarian Dr Satish as a keynote speaker on the topic.

She asked relevant questions to each librarian. For my part, what I shared was

Access alone does not guarantee the right use. Along with access, users need to be provided with good training to find and use the right articles from this huge volume of literature
We also need to have efforts where the collection needs to be integrated with databases like PubMed. When one searches PubMed - he/she should get a filter that allows for locating articles that are available free through the ONOS platform
Users need to be trained to use this filter

Every panelist and the keynote speaker Dr Satish, provided similar useful inputs. At the end, Dr Padma encouraged all attendees to explore the site thoroughly, keep learning more and keep teaching their users continuously.

For me - it was a day well spent.

But it also made me reminisce. Years ago, our country had access to a very useful resource - "The Cochrane Library" - a database of evidence in medicine. This resource was open to just anyone in India. Sadly after a few years, this was quietly withdrawn. And during the few years, at every lecture that I delivered - when I asked "How many of you have heard of the Cochrane Library" - very few hands would go up.

The effort towards promotion and training was negligible. The Government spent money to provide access, but this lacuna led to low usage and a quiet withdrawal. During the panel discussion, I stressed the need for promotional awareness and training, using this example

I sincerely hope that we will have a much larger effort towards promotion and training - with ONOS. From QMed's side, I commit to spreading the word about the ONOS and exploring how best we can help people to exploit this resource.

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