QMedCONNECT: APRIL 2015

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: April 2015

Dear friends

I am really pleased to share with you, that the new financial year has started very well, with our being able to have conducted two workshops, one Workshop@QMed and six lectures in the month of April. This is the minimum of what we would like to do in a month – we welcome more such activities! The trend is very positive – as we also have one workshop in May, two each coming up in the months of June and July, and tw0 again (maybe three) in August in the cities of Pondicherry, Nagpur, Chennai and Pune respectively. What makes the QMed team really delighted is that in April, June, July and August, one workshop every month is for UG students.

Initiatives to inculcate interest in research for undergraduate students has a history starting with the ICMR – setting up the STS scholarship in 1979. It was later in 2007 and 2008, when Dr. MG Deo organized conferences for this target audience, to present their work, in Pune, that students got excited about doing research and presenting their work. In 2009, it was the first time that students themselves, encouraged by Dr Deo, took the lead and organized the conference on their own – (of course – with support from their parent institution). Medicon – as the conference was termed is now an annual event, organized in a different medical college every year. Meanwhile more UG conferences have sprung up – some of them are Illuminati in AFMC Pune, DeMedCon in SDUMC Kolar, SIMSCON in SMVMCH Puducherry, Conventus in KMC Manipal and I am sure there are more. We are delighted that all these events have started to include our workshop. This is the beginning, and we hope that in the years to come, UG students learn the art of literature searching and managing references, right in their curriculum!

The other good trend that we are observing is the emergence of health professionals wanting to create guidelines, write systematic reviews or other research articles, taking the trouble to get in touch with us before they start their work! Most of them have made the effort of attending our workshop. And then, are working in consultation with us, for the literature searches. So, with this great start in the new financial year, we hope to report good progress with time!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Do You Know

The Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research (GFMER) is an organization that works closely with the WHO in the area of Human Reproduction. Their website – www.gfmer.ch/000_Homepage_En.htm – has a treasure trove of resources. Click the link – “Databases, links” and discover an alphabetical list of genetic diseases, a subject wise list of free medical journals, medical images, guidelines and more. Everything here is available free. We thank Dr Basabh Mukherjee from Kolkata who shared information about this resource with us.

Interesting Reading

The article – An online evidence based medicine exercise prompts reflection in third year medical students

Lewin LO, Robert NJ, Raczek J, Carraccio C, Hicks PJ. An online evidence based medicine exercise prompts reflection in third year medical students. BMC Med Educ. 2014 Aug 9;14:164.PMID: 25106435

The article talks about “reflective practice” and its importance in a physician’s professional practice. The authors speak about how it is important for doctors to have this trait and yet, we still do not know how well this is taught in the curriculum. They then describe how their exercise of teaching EBM skills to third year medical students seemed to indicate that this was an important element in inculcating reflective practice.

Story/Participant Experience

Dr Deepika Nandanwar – Final Year PG Student, Dept of Community Medicine, Seth GS Medical College & KEM Hospital shares her story:

After attending your session of “How to use PubMed for finding references”, it was really easy for me to search the references that I had got earlier. I could cite the same articles for which I had got the abstracts. And I could find around 37 articles in just 2-3 hrs for which I earlier took around 3-4 days.Also it was very easy to arrange my references in the required style by the reference management sites that you had mentioned. It has really helped me to submit my thesis on time without any delay.

What we did – April 2015

I) Talks on literature searching / referencing /citing at

SVT College of Home Sciences, SNDT University, Mumbai.- April 06
Research Methodology Workshop at Nair Hospital – April 15
Research Methodology Workshop at Sion Hospital – April 16
Dr M.H. Dhawale Memorial Homeopathic Institute, Dahisar- April 16
D.Y. Patil, College of Ayurveda, Navi Mumbai- April 19
FAIMER – Apr 29

II) Workshops – institutional

• A full-day workshop on PubMed and Mendeley at Sri Devraj Urs Medical College (SDUMC), Kolar on Apr 22 for a group of 30 faculty members and PG students.

• A full-day workshop on PubMed and Mendeley at ‘DeMedCon’ an undergraduate conference organized and conducted by Sri Devraj Urs Medical College (SDUMC), Kolar on April 23 for a group of 30 UG students from colleges across South India.

III) Workshops@QMed

PubMed Basics

We conducted one workshop@QMed for a group of three pre-PG students.

Participant Feedback

I never thought that this session would be useful to me to such an extent. To be frank, I opted for QMed pre-conference workshop since I did not get seat for the other ones. But now I believe that it was nice to have attended this session and this experience will obviously help me in the future. Mr. Pranav Prem,UG student, Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College and Hospital, Pondicherry.
This is a wonderful workshop; It makes our work dead easy and narrows down our search, Workshops based on theoretical knowledge can be learnt from various sources but QMed workshop must be conducted in order to narrow down our search and save our precious time.
Ms Merlyn Sniky, UG student, Tagore Medical College and Hospital, Chennai.
This session was very useful. Please conduct such sessions on yearly basis which will help students to write their synopsis, thesis and articles. Ms Deepa Rajesh, Msc student, SDUMC, Kolar.

Workshop for UG students of DeMedCon

PG/Faculty workshop at SDUMC