QMedCONNECT Newsletter: September 2016

Dear friends

September was light for lectures and workshops. We had only one lecture in Nashik and one in Delhi. But, the one in Delhi was unique. An MBBS student - Nitya Beriwal, from the Lady Hardinge Medical College, reached out to us after finding us through a Google search, and asked if we could do a workshop for them during their event - Splash. It turned out that they did not have the budget to pay for our workshop or even for our travel, for a lecture. We discussed this internally and decided to go ahead and do the lecture, simply because Nitya made all efforts possible, to get us out there! I made a day trip to Delhi, and did a two hour lecture for 40 MBBS students, who were all only too enthusiastic about soaking up all that I had to teach. Do see a feedback on this here.

This week - Oct 1 - 8 , we are participating in the Daan Utsav event, where we are laying the foundation for helping 100 Postgraduate Residents with their thesis, for the literature search and referencing components. We are fundraising for this on the ImpactGuru crowdsourcing portal and will be very happy to have your donations as well as social media shares from the website. We wish to collect Rs. 500 each from 500 people. And if we raise more, we can always do more! We'd love to see some generous inflows.

Do help us reach out!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

From our Blog

Online course on Research Writing - Oct 18 - Nov 28, 2016

AuthorAID - a free international research community - offers free online courses in research writing and proposal writing for researchers in developing countries. Their courses are hosted on INASP Moodle. Their upcoming online course in research writing, begins on 18 October 2016. The Deadline to enroll is 16 October 2016.

View our blogpost for more information

Clinical Trials Course : Patient and Physician Preferences – CMC Vellore – Oct 13 – 15, 2016

The department of Biostatistics, CMC Vellore is conducting this course in Collaboration with Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McMaster University, Canada, for 45 participants.

View the blog post for more information

Did You Know

Household products database

Wish to know more about potential health effects, safety and handling of the several products that we use in our kitchen, bathroom and laundry area? Check out the Household products database by the National Library of Medicine, USA. Available at https://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/index.htm, this is an initiative of the National Library of Medicine. While it is US oriented, a lot of it will be useful in our Indian context. Ideally of course, we need our own Indian database like this one!

To read more of our "Did you know" posts, do check out our blog posts on these

Interesting Reading

Faridhosseini F et al.

Effect of changing journal clubs from traditional method to evidence-based method on psychiatry residents
Adv Med Educ Pract. 2016 Aug 10;7:483-7
PubMed PMID 27570469

An interesting study in Iran, where the focus of journal clubs for residents was "evidence-based" articles only. The training programs done before this study, and the involvement of faculty in teaching, during the journal club sessions is another good point. The small study (18 residents) showed that the changed method was effective. The limitations are also discussed.

To see a collection of articles we have covered earlier, click here

From QMed’s Calendar

Talks on Literature Search / Referencing & Citing at

• Vasantrao Pawar Medical College, Nashik - 2nd Sep

• Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi - 26th Sept - for under-graduate students as part of "Splash" - their Annual festival.

QMed Participates

1. Vasumathi Sriganesh attended a Capacity Building Workshop on Sexual Harassment Policies on Sep 21. Organized by the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy (CAP), the speaker for the morning was Mr. Harish Sadani - an expert on the topic. We learned that it was important for us to draft one, let every employee know about it, and how they can take help of the policy, if needed. While ours is an all women organization, we were told that it was still important to have one, as we do have male visitors to our premises! That was an eye opener.

2. Vasumathi Sriganesh attended a two day event - the India CSR Summit on the 27-28 of September. There were panel discussions that gave us insights into the CSR activities in India, a couple of 'teaching sessions' and lots of networking opportunities. The most important take away was that companies are very serious about finding good NGOs to work with! Some of them were nice enough to say that companies are now begging for good projects and it is not the NGOs that need to beg for money! We do have miles to go before we have a good synergy between companies and NGOs for the CSR activities; lots need to evolve. Efforts are however well in place. Another highlight was the Google for Non Profits session. To learn more - do visit - google.co.in/nonprofits