Helping medical students become better doctors

My father was a Professor in a reputed institute of Engineering. He was a very early riser and would read / study before his classes, every day. My mother once jokingly asked him - "You have been teaching for years. Do you still need to study everyday?" (This was in the 1960s - when the only updates one could get were from one's own library). My father's reply was - "My students are very bright. I need to be able to answer any questions that they come up with".

Fast forward to the 2000s when Internet access has changed a lot of things for us. The rate at which each of us needs to learn is mind boggling. With technological changes, the way we teach also needs to keep on changing. Inspired by my dad, I always kept QMed's teaching material as up to date as possible. I could do this with the help of my colleagues and several fellow librarians' inputs from all over the world. While I could do this easily for the material I created for my lectures and workshops, we obviously felt that we must keep updating our online courses at a good frequency too. 

Early this year, we also felt that we needed to move on to our own platform for hosting our courses, so that we had complete control on how we could maintain them. While our hosts did a lot for us - and we are grateful for their help in launching our courses online a couple of years back, like many good things, this needed to change

We worked on creating our platform. When it was time to record our courses, the country announced our lockdown! Luckily we were well prepared with our plan of action. And with some trial and error, and with the help of my husband, I found the correct spot in my home, for recording the videos (ensuring good lighting and the right background)

In a month, I managed to record 90 videos and 65 screen captures that were needed to complete the three online courses. We are now working on the “rest of the site” and look forward to launching it very soon.

We plan to ask people to donate a nominal amount of Rs 2000, to access the courses. Meanwhile we learned from a webinar on online courses, that we need not wait for the site to be perfect before we launch it. We have asked people to donate just Rs 1500 as an early view offering and people have started enrolling! 

With this move for a nominal donation, we wish to reach out to medical and health sciences students in every nook and corner of India. We also will be aksing medical schools to subscribe at a nominal cost and then provide access to anyone studying or employed in the institution. We will be able to go on updating the courses, adding new ones and interacting with our participants, enabling continuous learning! 

Do stay tuned in with us to watch our progress. With your help in the last few years, we now feel poised to make the massive reach out that is needed in the country!. The new site is currently on www.qmedcourses.in/courses 

The year 2020 started off with a bang - with a schedule of two lectures and one workshop in January. The first lecture was in an event for about nearly 100 Clinical Pharmacologists and had lovely feedback from participants from all over India. The second lecture was in an event organized by the Telemedicine Society of India and the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Health Informatics of the MGUMST. This event was for everyone working in any area of health informatics.The theme of the event was Workforce Development in Digital Health.  I was invited to speak on "Skills to Frame Online Searches". 

The first part of my talk was about what I teach to upskill searching. In the second part, I shared my observations over so many years - the lacuna, the upskilling needed, and the dangers of not doing so. I told the audience that searching is not something learned once and then simply carried out; there is a lot of upgrading to do in these skills. I suggested the need for developing professionals in this area and the need for institutions to plan for employing such skilled people and paying them right. 

The twenty minute talk was highly appreciated. The first comment was about how I had explained everything very lucidly, and I was really glad to have got my points across well. Advocacy needs clear communication and I was happy that this had worked. I was then inundated with questions about how QMed could help different institutions and their students and faculty, and still better - I got the offer for help in my planning and future directions, from a person who is an expert in education and intellectual property related matters.

As I said - 2020 started off well. I look forward to a workshop that I will be conducting in the coming week - for Family Physicians, as part of their conference. 

With the new year, we hope that GlobalGiving will be able to solve the challenges with the Indian Govermental regulations soon too! We once again wish you a Happy New Year and look forward to your support this year too.