Education India Project #14455

Better Search Skills - Better Healthcare for India

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Better Search Skills - Better Healthcare for India

Project Report | Aug 11, 2014
'An undergrad medical student - and I have a research publication in PubMed"!

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Project Leader

Bhavik Shah's poster at Medicon

Bhavik Shah is a final year medical student. He shares with us - how QMed made a difference in his quest to learn research methods:

I study in a premier medical college in India. At the undergraduate level there is no exposure to research. In my second year, I applied for the Short Term Studentship program of the Indian Council of Medical Research. My project was not selected, but I was lucky to be selected to present it at 'Medicon'. Medicon is an annual conference for undergrad medical students. It was in this event, I learned how to search medical literature from Mrs. Vasumathi Sriganesh, founder of QMed. She delivered a lecture on this topic, at a workshop on Evidence Based Medicine. I took a lot of notes. I realized that I had hardly known anything about this!

A year later, a faculty member in my college encouraged me to submit two case reports. I referred to all my notes to do the search, and this helped me complete two manuscripts in a month! I submitted them to a PubMed indexed journal with a good impact factor. After a couple of revisions, (now that sounds quick, while I was doing the revisions, the intervals seemed long!) one morning I finally heard the 'magic ping' in my Blackberry - giving me the good news - "It is a pleasure to accept your manuscript for publication"!!

Here is the link to my article. Thank you QMed - directly from the left ventricle of my heart :) You have no idea how grateful I am for the workshop at Medicon!

Bhavik Shah

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In the last two months we have delivered seven lectures in medical schools, and conducted a workshop for faculty of a dental college in Bijapur. Bijapur is a small town which is an overnight journey from our city of Mumbai

We were also part of this year's Medicon - where we were invited to deliver a lecture on literature searching at a preconference workshop on research methodology . Medicon appreciated our support and acknowledged us on their banner!

QMed's E-Learning portal is progressing well. We hope to announce the launch date in our next report if things go as planned. Thank you all for your support! And a special thanks to all those who contributed in July - we raised around $650 during the bonus day. Do continue to support us and please do share our stories with your friends.

QMed's support - mentioned in the workshop banner

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Jun 9, 2014
Student story: "Five clicks are all it takes - from problem to solution"

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Project Leader

Vidya Giri Shankar

Vidya Giri Shankar is a recent medical graduate. She attended QMed's workshop on searching medical literature. She shares with us:

"With QMed’s guidance I am now able to access my most specific requirements of journal articles and definitive answers to therapeutic dilemmas. I come straight to the answers, without having to exhaust hours of unnecessary inputs. My experience with QMed has been transformational in the way I approach and use scientific data. And what is most fascinating is QMed’s principles can be applied universally. Five clicks are all it takes to go from problem to solution."

In our last report (March 2014) we mentioned about how medical schools wanted to have our workshops for students, but were constrained due to exams. And we were keen to do some soon. We then had a wonderful idea - "why not offer workshops in QMed's office instead? We could do this for individuals and up to groups of four. And the participants would get more personal attention”.

So we announced this plan on our website. And we almost instantly had requests from three UG students, who came and went through two workshops. Vidya was one of them. Later, we also had a few young consultants who attended. All of them have promised to teach students whom they mentor!

All our efforts have only proved strongly that E-Learning modules are urgently needed to reach out to students all over India. And we are happy to let you know that our portal is progressing very well. Two of us from QMed had a day long interaction with Ballistic Learning (the portal developers) in the end of May to review the progress and make our next level plans. The work is intense but we are loving every minute of it.

Heartfelt thanks to all those who made an additional contribution on our Bonus Day on May 7. We raised $1087 on that date and got a 30% bonus for this. Some contributors gave after the Bonus Day and we raised another $2080 in the next few days.

Each one of you who has contributed since September 2013, is playing an important role in improving Indian healthcare through an important change in the medical education system. We hope more people will join this effort and we are sure that the E-Learning portal will make exponential changes! And we will work to ensure that changes happen in every medical school in India.

Manthan, Vidya & Nikhilesh at our Workshop@QMed

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Mar 14, 2014
Helping Medical Students Become Better Doctors - Lectures, Workshops, E-Learning modules & more!

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Project Leader

We are delighted to share some updates about the first three months of 2014, that is January to March. What is interesting is that we were not exactly able to do what we hoped to do - which was - workshops for Undergrad Medical Students. But several exciting things have developed, which will definitely contribute to our long term dream. Some developments were unexpected. We overall feel that we are entering a very promising phase.

The unexpected: mandate of research workshops: The MUHS (Maharashtra University of Health Sciences) has made it mandatory for every Resident doctor and faculty member in medical schools to go through Research Methodology workshops. Suddenly we had a flurry of invitations and have delivered around 25 lectures this quarter. At these events, we talked about our workshops and our E-learning project and people are very excited about them. We also conducted three workshops since January (we had UG students in two of these) and will be doing four more this month (March).

E-Learning: The most exciting activity for us right now is that we are deep into the creation of our E-Learning resources portal. We signed a deal with Ballistic Learning in January, and they are doing an excellent job of creating the necessary infrastructure for our portal. We are hoping to launch it in the middle of this year. We believe that this portal will make a big difference to students and health professionals in the country.

As I mentioned, with the MUHS mandate, the medical schools got busy and kept us busy with lectures too. This did not allow us to plan workshops exclusively for UG (medical school) students. To make up for this, in future workshops that we organize, we are going to keep registrations free for UG students, and subsidized for residents. And so the contributions you have given us will get distributed between the Elearning programs and our workshops.

We are really happy with the current developments and that we could use your contributions very well! We have also raised an equivalent of about $750 through local resources

Our major requirement right now is for the next phases of the E-Learning portal. We look forward to raising $300 (GBP 180) from about 100 individuals, so that we can get it ready by the middle of this year. Can you help us raise this?

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