Helping medical students become better doctors

Just a month after we shared a donor story, we are lucky to get another one to share with you. Again an old friend,  S Viswanathan was my husband's colleague for several years and his family and ours still share a great rapport.

Viswanathan – better known as Vishy amongst our group, has been a regular donor and often been one when I put out specific appeals. Every time we got a donation from him, we felt so good! Vishy has also been a “sounding board” just like Raman - who I wrote about earlier.

When I asked Vishy what made him give QMed regularly, this is what he said:

Like many others, when I crossed 50, I started setting aside a certain percentage of my income each year for ''giving back'', through contributions to selected causes I wanted to support. Initially most of the recipients were well-known NGOs. Most of the times, the organisation remained faceless and my contributions were probably too small for me to know the impact!

I decided that I would be happier to contribute to organizations run by people I know and trust. I felt that in such organizations I could learn how they would utilize my contributions (small or large), and how I could help further. QMed presented me such an opportunity in the last several years, and I have been very happy to be their supporter.

When Vasumathi reached out to me about QMed, what impressed me was her deep understanding and solving an interesting problem. The time and effort required in understanding, accessing and utilizing various information resources in Health Care, for Research and Practice. Her solutions are solidly grounded on her knowledge and experience in the field of Library & Information Sciences. With her team, she is on the road to share their skill building training across India. I am impressed with her deep passion for implementing her ideas to make a difference in the field.

Add to these, the fact that, having known her for several decades, she enjoyed my full trust, and my decision to be a regular donor, was easy.

I wish Vasu and her QMed team many successes as they try to implement new ideas and grow in size and stature.

Thank you Vishy from all of us at QMed! Our best wishes to you and your family.

Links:

• About our Foundation
• About our courses
• Our e-learning courses

In the last two years, our ELearning courses have elicited great feedback. Occasionally our participants have given suggestions for enhancing one or more aspects and we have made quite a few changes based on these. In fact, we have given “badges of appreciation” to those whose ideas we used.

We also had been noting down our own ideas on how we could enhance the courses. One important idea was to add lots more questions to the Final Assessment Quiz of each course. By doing this, we could allow participants to attempt an assessment as many times as they wished to. As they attempted again the probability of getting new questions to answer would be high. By answering different questions, their learning would better and better.

We are happy to share that we have finally compiled all these and are all set to incorporate them in the site in the coming few days. We are waiting to get feedback about them from participants. The good part is that for those participants who want certificates with high scores, they can keep trying until they get the best scores. Moreover, for us, what is great is now – we can plan to add more and more questions with time, to enhance the learning experience further.

We recently had two webinars that got us great feedback. The first was one where I spoke to Palliative Care practitioners. They were delighted to learn about the Mendeley software for managing references. One of them said “This is the first time I learnt how exactly I should use this tool”. The other was a webinar, which we ourselves conducted for our ELearning participants. We had five people who attended and all of them fervently thanked us for all that we did for them.

Links:

• About our Foundation
• About our courses
• Our e-learning courses