Helping medical students become better doctors

QMed always enjoys doing events for or organized by Undergraduate medical students, because they are an audience that loves to learn, and they take great efforts to organize events. Here we share a Guest Post by the students of the SKN Medical College, Pune, who are members of the Student Research Forum. Some of them had attended a workshop by QMed earlier (in an external event) and went back to their College and ensured that they had a workshop for all their colleagues! This post was contributed by the Students Research Forum of SKNMC and Aditya Khanijo coordinated with QMed for submitting this story.

We, the members of the Student Research Forum – SKNMC Pune are a team dedicated to promoting research activities amongst undergraduate medical students and sensitising/educating them about research.

As a part of this effort, we came up with an idea of organising a workshop on Citations, Navigating PubMed and using a Reference Management software (Mendeley), after conducting a basic "Induction to Research workshop" for students. There were no second thoughts and the decision to invite Mrs. Vasumathi from QMed was unanimous, as some of us had attended her workshop through Quest.

We did this in record time. We broadcasted a lot of messages and spread of the word and in no time we got a huge response from about 140 dedicated students who attended the two hour session. Vasumathi ma’am was fantastic, no doubt and we got a lot of positive feedback and comments from the students who attended the session. Our efforts bore fruit and we would definitely advise the future SRF committees to carry out similar workshops for the batches to come. In fact soon after the workshop, some of the junior students showed interest in taking on research projects – something quite encouraging!

This wouldn’t have been possible without the constant support of Dr. P. S. Chawla, the SRF Faculty, Dr. R. S. Bangal (The Dean) and dr. A. V. Bhore (The Medical Director) of Smt. Kashibai Navale Medical College and General Hospital, Pune, who encourage our students to explore new fields everyday.

Dr Amol who is the Dean of Research of  Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College and Hospital, a medical college in South India,  recently wrote to us:

"I am happy to inform you that with your support we have improved the session on Literature Search in our Postgraduate orientation program. Since this year, it is now mandatory for our PGs to document their search strategy in their literature review section of their proposal. I look forward to see this happen properly. It has been a good learning for me too." 

One of QMed’s dreams is that there must be a mandate by every medical institution for Postgraduate residents to document their "search strategy" as part of their thesis. A search strategy is a systematic set of steps in doing an online search. We always thought that this would take ages as majority of health professionals and teachers are unaware of such steps. And so they do not teach them. When they are unaware and do not teach these skills, they cannot make such a mandate

Now one institution has made a start. Thank you for Dr Amol and SMVMCH for helping our dream to take off! We hope this paves the way for this to happen across the country.

How did SMVMCH make this happen? We had conducted workshops once a year at this institution for three years. Each year, there was one session for the postgraduate residents and faculty. And one for undergraduate medical school students from different schools - who came there for a conference.Faculty of SMVMCH learned these skills and them important enough to create such a mandate. PG students who attended our workshops understood the importance of systematic searching. UG students were made aware of these methods and had a firm foundation about them early in their careers. 

How will such a mandate help? If residents know that their search strategies will be evaluated in their theses, they will make an effort to learn how to do them well. The faculty of the institution will teach them and support them. If every institution does this, then the residents who will be tomorrow’s doctors will make it a practice to search right, and also do good research documentation. Healthcare in the country will be more and more evidence based. And medical research will be better documented.

QMed is working at a steady long term change towards better healthcare provision and health research documentation. The money you have given QMed so far is helping make this difference. 

We believe you could you could do more with QMed, to hasten the change that we are making:

• Talk about us to professionals or students you are in touch with. They need our training. 
• Become a monthly recurring donor. You can plan the amount you would like to give us for a year, but break it up into twelve monthly donations with the "Donate monthly" option. This helps us have a steady inflow of funds
• Share our story with your friends. The Facebook and Twitter links to share are right below! You never know - you may encourage friends to donate to us and that would be your additional help for QMed. 

Vasumathi