Helping medical students become better doctors

Rutuja recently completed her Undergraduate program in Dentistry and will soon be joining a Residency program. One of her faculty members advised her to learn literature searching and referencing from QMed, telling her that these skills would be much needed for her Residency program. Rutuja had earlier been engaged in medical writing activities and was keen. She attended the PubMed and Mendeley workshops at our office recently and here is what she shared with us:  

When I first started searching for articles for my research project, I struggled to find appropriate references. I was not aware of different databases used to find articles and had very limited knowledge of referencing and literature searching. That is when I was introduced to Vasumathi Sriganesh Ma’am and QMed, by my University professor. 

Attending this course has proven to be extremely helpful. I learned immensely about PubMed searches and how to search for articles on these databases systematically and methodically using different Boolean operators, fields and tags. The session also included – Mendeley Software training which helped me cite and store articles with ease. It also helped me overcome all the difficulties I faced while searching, writing and referencing the article and hence I am grateful for the guidance and this experience. This is going to help me tremendously when I move abroad for my Master’s program. 

I highly recommend this course to anyone who will be starting their Research projects or Thesis, as the quality of information conveyed by the QMed team will definitely prove beneficial.

 It was wonderful having Rutuja at our office for the workshop. She was very keen and very sharp in absorbing what we taught. We are often asked if what we teach is really applicable and is understood by Undergraduate (medical/ allied health courses) students and if this is too early for them, but we believe that this is the best time to learn. And Rutuja's enthusiasm and understanding, only strengthened our belief. Our teaching has to get into the Undergraduate medical / dental and all allied health curricula!