Helping medical students become better doctors

In our report for June 2018 we had mentioned about the launch of our first ELearning course. This was on "Mastering PubMed". The course was launched in mid May and between then and now, we have around 30 plus individuals who have registered. More importantly, a very large association - The Association of Minimal Access Surgeons of India (known as AMASI) has subscribed to our course for all its members - totalling more than 10000 in number! This was a big success story for us! 

In all our years of promoting our workshops and teaching, we were constantly told that surgeons would not have time for such learning and are not our likely audience. So it was a really happy moment for us when the first Association that signed up for our course was one of surgeons. 

We have also approached medical schools, residency programs, research institutions and hospitals asking them to take up our course for their students, residents and health professionals. Quite a few have indicated interest, and we are hoping to see more signups. 

The good part is that if many large institutions sign up for our ELearning courses, QMed Knowledge Foundation will move towards self sustenance and then we hope that we can raise funds for more specific projects. It is important for non-profits like ours to reach that stage. In the last five years every donor's contribution has helped us build our strength to where we are today and where we hope to reach. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! 

What we would like from every donor is to join the group of recurring donors that we have. Could you plan out what you would like to give QMed per month and sign up to be a recurring donor? We hope that in a year to eighteen months we could write to you and then ask for your recurring donations to again be converted to donations for specific purposes. Hoping to see many more recurring donors - whether you choose to give $10 per month of anything up to $500 

Happy Diwali from India! 

Vasumathi

You have always read stories about people we help. This time we share a story about how we are working to help ourselves build a better QMed! This - by working on our Impact Measurement methods

Global Giving held the Social Impact Academy between June and July, 2018, for non-profits hosted on its portal. QMed was privileged to be a part of the cohort of fifty chosen to participate in the Academy!

QMed has an active student base that it continuously attempts to engage. We have had our efforts in place, but always wanted better ways to measure the impact of our efforts. The Academy taught us the importance of change that has meaning and can be measured. What was special about this Academy? Let me list some of it for you:

• The Academy taught us, over and over, the importance of involving service receivers in this scenario. In several exercises that we had to do, we took feedback / discussed with the people we help, and got their inputs. We learned how much more we could do this way. 
  
  
• We learned to acknowledge the importance of giving emphasis to our failure stories. Facing failure, writing about the failure story and learning from it, was emphasized - it made us more grateful when we had to recover from a slump in one of our projects.
  
  

• Among the most important things we gained from the Academy was a log-frame for our activities. The idea, as we understood from reading the Academy notes, was not to make metrics that would appeal to donors alone, but ones which we would be able to understand and work with as well. We have to link the outputs and the impact we desire, to the ways in which these people- our people- operate (something we learnt from the Theory of Change).

• Another crucial take-away was a comprehensive feedback loop. We learnt the two questions to ask to gauge levels of community involvement:

  • Are we doing the things you want us to do?
  • Are they of the highest priority/value to you?
    
    
• Thanks to the Academy, we now have a feedback loop that we can use to engage our participants further, know what they want from us and use it in the future to keep improving.
  
  
• The penultimate webinar talked of the importance of stories and how we need to get powerful stories that when shared would help not just donors be happy, but the people we help too - to understand what all we can do for them

We now have a host of new ideas and learning experiences about how to translate these ideas to action. We are putting what we learnt to use in our actions every-day, and hope to do much better in our impact generation areas. 

We attach a log frame that we created for the Lectures that we deliver and have started implementing some of the means of verification, and we still need to work harder to be accurate in this, but we are at it - full force! 

Do let us know if you have more ideas to share!  We would welcome inputs from you. 

• Logframe_for_Lectures.pdf (PDF)