Education India Project #14455

Helping medical students become better doctors

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Project Report | Jul 11, 2022
Can patients / families help doctors with Internet researching?

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Doctors – often correctly – worry about their patients googling their health conditions and learning wrong stuff. Or when they go overboard knowing the side effects of drugs. The worst bit that doctors face is when patients doubt their treatment plans. So it is but natural for them to say “No” as an answer to the question posed.

But, there are times when Internet research by the patient (or family member) can make a huge difference.

Here is an excerpt from a Facebook post by Dr Sakthi (story taken with his permission)

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Last weekend, an anxious couple met me for a consult. They had travelled 150km to meet me.

The previous day, the mother, after picking up her daughter from school, noticed that the girl's innerwear was bloodstained. She consulted a Gynecologist who did some tests and then asked them to see an Endocrinologist. That brought them to me. I arrived at a diagnosis – severe primary hypothyroidism.

Just as I was about to explain this to the parents, the mother asked:

"Doctor, have you heard about a syndrome called Van Wyk Grumbach syndrome? Could my child have it? I browsed through the net after we got the reports and this condition seemed to match well. What do you think Doctor? I asked few of my Doctor friends and they had no idea."

And… she was right! I then explained how it could be resolved with thyroid supplementation and their young girl would be fine soon

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Internet searching for health information is extremely common and is never going to stop. There is need for hard work to tackle problems that emerge with this activity.

A system by which educated consumers can understand and be trained to know:

The difference between reliable resources and junk resources
How to find relevant information and what is an “evidence based resource”
How to discuss the information found, with the doctor, keeping in mind time constraints
Most importantly – how to be responsible for one’s own decisions – especially if one wants to do something different from what the treating doctor recommends

In the health professions we need big changes

1. Training in:

Understanding authentic vs non-authentic resources
Searching quickly for reliable information
Finding the evidence

2. Recognizing the urgent need for trained “informationists” to help both – the health professionals and patients / consumers to search for reliable information as well as evidence based information.

We at QMed had delivered a few consumer health lectures, which were very well received. Sadly we could not sustain this activity. I dream of a day when this becomes a reality – where doctors, patients and librarians can research together for great patient outcomes! I know it is quite some time away.

In the meantime we continue our efforts to create a generation of health professionals who know how to search for evidence and how to find needles in haystacks. We have made good progress in this.

Make a donation to us. When you donate, you are contributing to a future with evidence based healthcare. With support we may actually find solutions to doctors and patients working together for better health of the population at large.

Links:

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Jun 23, 2022
New program - Launch of "I-Web" - Interactive webinars

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

“What can we do to attract more students, and healthcare professionals to join our learning programs?”

This is a question that is of top priority for everyone at QMed, every single day.

We have so far delivered lectures and free webinars, conducted workshops, and launched “learn at your pace” – e-learning courses. For these courses, individuals donate Rs. 2000/- and institutions pay a moderate annual fee that provides access to all students and employees

The good outcomes of our programs:

We have a lot of positive feedback and stories – and we have shared many of them.

But… that has been for a small “numerator” of the population that we address

For our mission to be fulfilled, there is long way to go because there is a “denominator” of people who have still not been able to learn from us. There are broadly two categories of such people

Those who have not yet heard about us
Those who have, but have not started their learning sessions (even if enrolled on our site)

For the first category, we are constantly carrying out awareness promotions. The second category seemed to be a bigger challenge!

So what did we do?

We launched one more option. Offered a paid webinar of one hour duration. We held this on June 15, 2022. We asked potential participants to donate Rs 500/- to attend the webinar. We had 31 registrations. As in any workshop, we gave them pre and post tests and also encouraged hands on interactivity, which the participants loved.

At the end of the session, we offered all of them a choice of getting access to our courses by donating another Rs 500/-.

The result?

Most of them took up the offer! As we experiment, we understand that we need to think of several different ways to get people hooked on to learning from QMed!

What are we going to do next?

We are going to offer a longer webinar session (2 hours plus), ask participants to donate Rs 2000/- and then at the end, we will activate access to our E-Learning courses for all. A longer webinar session will be like a workshop. We plan to restrict the number of participants to 15 in order to personalize interactivity and individual learning as much as we can.

We hope that many such events will lead to lots more learning

Overall – some join our site first and ask for webinar sessions. Some attend a webinar and then join. The order does not matter. The learning definitely does!

Links:

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Jun 9, 2022
Donor-cum-beneficiary story - a student's heartfelt letter

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

As a Founder of QMed, amongst several things I do, are the mundane but important jobs like clearing bunches of paper.

Last week I was clearing and reorganizing files and papers, when I found this “straight-from-the-heart-letter” written by a (then) student - Pranab. This was several years ago. He had first met me at a conference for UG students in the city of Kolkata. He himself had finished his MBBS then but was helping this group.

During a subsequent visit of mine to Kolkata, while we made plans to meet, he could not make it and he felt really bad about this. After which he wrote this letter. I am sharing some excerpts.

Ma’am

First, a litany of apologies for writing so late. Please accept this little offering* as a token of respect and appreciation of what you and QMed means to us. Unfortunately the amount is too meagre to make a tangible difference to QMed but I am hoping that someday I shall be able to make a more meaningful contribution.

I wanted this gift to be a surprise for you. I really hope you like this surreptitious dispatch of love, respect and honour, all moistened with my skills of procrastination.

I hope that I can get to right the wrong of not being able to meet you, very soon! And while I rue the fact that I cannot send some mishti doi** along with this, I hope that someday I can treat you to the best mishti doi in town!

Pranab subsequently did an MD in Community Medicine in Delhi and we were lucky to be able to meet twice in his college, when I did workshops there. I still remember his feedback after attending a PubMed workshop that I conducted:

I realized that I have been using PubMed much like a caveman used a hammer back in the Paleolithic era!

He is now in the US and works in the Public Health area. We are in touch with each other.

Finding such letters makes one’s day. It reminds us that we have touched the lives of people who learn from us. To the extent that they themselves donate to our projects.

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*Pranab had enclosed a cheque for Rs 1000/-. To me it was certainly not a “little offering”. True that it could not make a huge difference to QMed in monetary terms. But a sudden surprise and the intent – from a student who was not yet earning steadily, was a big contribution!

**Mishti doi is a famous sweet in Kolkata – one of my favourites. Pranab remembered that I had asked for a second helping at the students’ event.

Links:

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