Education India Project #14455

Helping medical students become better doctors

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Project Report | Dec 5, 2023
"THIRST for AIIMS" - one more

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

Medical students - AIIMS Bathinda solving problems

You learnt about our earlier "THIRST for AIIMS" workshops in our July and August reports. We did one more in November - AIIMS Bathinda (Punjab). While we had a lull after August thanks to some other urgent priorities, the Bathinda event happened suddenly. One Dr Ankita had contacted me about help for the literature search for her Systematic Review. As we discussed it, I mentioned about our workshops. She jumped at the idea and got it all organized!

I did the workshop on the 7th of November. To travel to Bathinda, I had to fly to Chandigarh and then go by road to Bathinda. Thankfully the roads were excellent (unlike in some parts of India). However one spends the better part of the day in travelling.

The workshop had about 50 people - around 25 faculty members, 15 residents and 10 medical students. As always the feedback was good and the mention of "I wish I had learnt it earlier" came up.

Here is one from Dr Gagandeep from the Dept of Pharmacology.

The other interesting bits were a feedback from Dr Kanwarpreet - a Second Year resident. She said "I have learnt all this now, while I really should have learnt this in the second year of medical school"!

Another faculty member told me that she called her daughter who was a medical student, told her to miss classes for a day and attend this session. This happened soon after I started the session and she felt it would be good for her to attend.

We still need to conduct our workshops at three more AIIMS institutions. I am following up with more than three and hoping that I can cover a couple of extra institutions as we have used the grant money carefully and can definitely accommodate more.

Do wish us the best!

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Aug 18, 2023
"THIRST For AIIMS" - Major progress!

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

Practice exercise session at AIIMS Jodhpur

In our July 9 communication of Donor Connect, mentioned about the THIRST For AIIMS project being on the “take off mode”. July turned out to be great for us as we did sessions in AIIMS Raipur (July 14), AIIMS Guwahati (July 20) and AIIMS Kalyani (July 22).

We had varied experiences with each institution as we planned the events. AIIMS Raipur gave us only 1.5 hours of time. AIIMS Guwahati gave three hours and Kalyani gave two three hour slots. We had offered a full day session to all.

But over years I have figured out how to handle sessions of varying length, how much to teach and more. Importantly I convey one message to all. That there is a very structured method of literature searching and referencing and that if people invest time in learning these skills they gain a large time saving in their professional life. Most often at the end of the session, people themselves express their feelings – that they need longer sessions!

In every institution I had discussions with people about how we can make sure that majority in their institution finish all of our courses.

An interesting addition was that many participants asked me about how I could speak and present very well. The second question that was interesting was – how I had the energy to speak the whole day without losing energy and keep an audience engaged. These questions made me feel good.

I had to first acknowledge the “genetic element” – that my father and grandfather were great teachers and orators and that their skills had crept into my genes. Regarding the energy element, I told them it was a mix of passion, love of teaching, and most recently having gone through NLP processes that added extra energy into me!

In addition to the above workshops, July offered the opportunity for a lecture at NIPER – National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Guwahati.

August 2023

Things peaked and through the Thirst for AIIMS grant, we did one workshop in AIIMS Rae Bareli (August 8), two in AIIMS Bhopal (11^th and 12^th) and one in AIIMS Jodhpur. All of them were full day workshops too. One of the workshops in Bhopal had two MBBS students, one who was in his first year! And he answered the toughest quiz question correctly. These are “Aha” moments for us – as we are able to convince the concerned people that these skills need to be introduced in the UG curriculum and students are capable of learning them

With this we have done events in six AIIMS institutions and need to do four more. We are sure of completing these pretty soon.

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Jul 12, 2023
"THIRST For AIIMS - Getting Started"

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder & CEO

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