The dream run of lectures/talks continued in the months of February and March. We delivered 20 lectures out of which 18 of them were in medical colleges in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. One lecture was at a first time event called the Symposium and Training on Research Methodology (STORM), at Index Dental College, in Indore. Another interesting talk titled ‘Decoding PubMed’ was at an event organized by Narayana Nethralaya in Bangalore.
The audience at most of these lectures (except STORM and Narayana Nethralaya ) were PG students who will be appearing for their exams in the coming months or had finished their thesis submission. Hence, we were told that with exam stress, they might not be very interested in these lectures. But that did not deter us. We began our lectures by telling them that the activity of literature search is not limited to a thesis or writing a paper. Learning to do an effective literature search will help them not just in any aspect of medical writing but in patient care as well. This logic seemed to work and though many students did say that they should have been taught this at the beginning of their PG course, there were many other group of students who told their faculties that this was better late than never.
In most of the places the lectures were followed by a group activity where we gave them an exercise of formulating a search strategy based on their query. Their enthusiastic participation and almost correct answers convinced us that they had absorbed the lecture contents well and had understood the concepts of information resources and literature searching.
STORM was a Research Methodology workshop at which we gave a lecture and an online demo. Narayana Nethralaya had organized an event for PGs and young doctors on a host of topics and ‘Decoding PubMed’ was a 20 minute session! These events spread the work of QMed to other cities and will hopefully pave the way for us to conduct workshops there too!
Contributed by Lakshmi Padmanabhan and Vasumathi Sriganesh
