Helping medical students become better doctors

Many people in India do not have International credit cards or Paypal Accounts. Dr Shivaprasad, a young faculty in a small town medical school in Bijapur, Karnataka is one of them. In November 2015, when we asked him for a donation, he told us "I cannot use my credit card for a dollar donation, and I do not have a Paypal Account either. But give me an hour and I will make my donation".

Shivaprasad has been a participant of our workshops last year. He felt so thankful about them that he has been in touch with us, looking for opportunities to help, as well as to learn more. And in November, when we had an opportunity to fund raise and get a bonus through GlobalGiving, he went out of his way to give us a donation. He approached a friend who he knew had a Paypal account, and asked him to make the dollar donation, promising that he would give him the amount in Rupees. 

The friend was busy and promised to donate in about four hours. And so Shivaprasad kept me posted, followed up with him and informed me as soon as the donation was made. When I thanked him on Facebook, for all his efforts, his response was

"I made a small donation, for a big effort that you are making to cover a lacuna in our medical teaching. Your appreciation is much higher than what I feel I deserve. But, let me thank you for all that you taught us; I use it all the time, and I wish to learn more and more from you"!

When I responded saying it was not for the amount, but for the effort that he made, he said "I am going to keep a screenshot of this conversation, I really cherish it".

After our last report on two workshops for medical students, I thought that in this report I would be telling you about more such workshops. Yes, I will, but we had one more dream come true, since then and would love to share that with you, as well!

We conducted three more workshops for students in July and August - in Nagpur, Manipal and Pune. We got great feedback and are thrilled that we could do so many UG workshops in a year. 

Now about the other dream. We always felt that our work should be helpful in rural India - that is where the lies the most challenging of healthcare needs.

And - we got a request from the "Jan Swasthya Sahyog" - a not for profit Society offering wonderful healthcare services in a remote rural area - Ganiyari, near Bilaspur in Chhatisgarh.  What was more interesting is, that the idea of inviting QMed to conduct workshops at JSS, was initiated by a very young doctor who had attended our session at a medical students conference earlier, and learned a lot from it! He suggested it to the founding doctors and they gladly worked on the idea.

Why does a rural health centre need such a workshop? Such centres treat large numbers of people with varying diseases and conditions and also have to tackle social problems of their patients. Publications on how to handle such problems need to be more diverse and in larger numbers. So such centres wish to publish more, and so obviously want all possible research skills. 

About 15-20 doctors and other health professionals attended our sessions on searching the medical literature and managing references. The sessions ran for one and a half days and groups of them discussed their special topics with us and got answers to questions and doubts that they had. One of the Founders summed up the workshop experience saying - "This was very good. We should do this annually in our institution - one for new doctors, and second for revision & improvement of all"

Thank you donors for helping us do all this. We do look forward to your help on a regular basis!