Helping medical students become better doctors

Greetings from QMed and our best wishes for the Holidays ahead and for a great new year! 

As we work on empowering medical and health sciences students for their future, their teachers need to be empowered too. Only then will they ensure that all students need to learn and perfect what we teach - effective literature searching & referencing skills. 

Meet Dr Girish - a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine in a medical college. He enrolled for our courses, so that he could do a systematic review. He recently decided to do a Masters Degree course . He needed to do this review for a project which was a part of the program. Here is his story. 

I recently completed a Masters in Epidemiology program from a reputed international university. I chose to do a systematic review as my final project to graduate. Doing a literature review was an essential component of this project.

The University mandated that I do the literature search on my own. I could take a librarian's guidance, but could not get the job done by one*

Though I had received some training in doing literature searches, soon I realised that I was not up to the mark. A friend referred me to Vasumathi from QMed and I reached out to her. I spoke to her and explained my situation. She quickly understood what I wanted and began guiding me every so thoughtfully. She advised me to enrol for the online course - Mastering PubMed – which QMed offered. I did the course and after that I spoke to her, cleared my doubts and went about running my search.

Over the next few weeks, I met with her online repeatedly and frequently texted her my doubts. After completing my search in PubMed, I moved on to searching other databases. Her guidance instils a sense of confidence and allows you to acquire the skills to be an independent researcher. It was highly satisfying to see my work as I went from database to database. Confusing terminology and the nuances of searching, now appear to be so simple. The skill of doing a literature review seems daunting initially. But the basic fundamentals that the QMedCourses give, really makes it easy and enjoyable.

Dr Girish recently called us to say that he had successfully passed the course. We at QMed are delighted. He was very sincere in his learning and grasped concepts quickly. He is now pushing others to learn from us. And he agrees that our courses need to reach medical students. 

Do share this story with medical faculty you know. Encourage them to encourage their students to learn!

And if this encourages you to make an year end donation for us to do more - that is very welcome!

Once again - Best Wishes for the Season and a Happy New Year from the QMed Team

*Systematic review authors most often involve a librarian trained for systematic review searches, to do the search. It is a regular practice

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