QMedCONNECT Newsletter: June 2018

Dear friends

In June we had some good developments.

Seven people enrolled for our ELearning module - Mastering PubMed: Basics, that we launched in May. Sixteen more have registered but need to get started. We are in discussions with a few institutions to have them provide access for a large number of residents and faculty. Do not miss out on enrolling and learning!

Nandini and I attended a six week online training on Impact Measurements, organized by GlobalGiving. Importantly we learned how to create "logframes" for all our activities and also how to engage our target audience in giving us feedback for these. We look forward to using these and making important changes in the way we implement our projects.

Our 100 pgs project is almost coming to an end, as we have completed workshops for 86 residents. We will do the sessions for another 14 residents. While we had raised funds for another 50, we had decided to divert those funds for our ELearning module, (which we launched last month). Getting 100 residents to enrol for our workshop proved to be far more challenging than we anticipated. And we discovered that the two main factors were - difficulty on promoting our program, and the time factor problem for PGs to attend a workshop.

Interestingly the difficulty in promotion is not because we could not reach out to them, but in their priorities, our workshops seemed to rank low, because they can still get away with "just okay referencing". We really need a shake up, where their literature and referencing are checked thoroughly in their thesis.

One resident - Rukman Mecca gave us some great insights into residents' issues and he told us how he helped get us more residents for our workshops. He also shared some great news of winning a decent grant for a project. He believes that our training will help him a lot more, in his research!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Did You Know

JANE is an online tool programmed to help you tune your research needs, such as finding an appropriate journal to publish your work in. How does it do this?

All journals whose details are in PubMed are found in JANE, inclusive of all authors with publications in the last ten years. It includes PubMed records that have abstracts, have been published in the last ten years, and do not belong to categories such as comment, editorials, historical articles and the like.
When you paste the title or abstract of your planned article, it will match your document/ query to a host of other documents in PubMed to provide you with the best match for your area of interest. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that JANE will not display articles for which there has been no entry in PubMed in a one year frame. This is so that the records being displayed are ones which have been actively used.

Read our blog post on JANE! More Do You Know blog posts

To try JANE for yourself, visit here.

Interesting Article

Research Methodology Workshops- An Essential Need

Shrivastava M, Shah N, Navaid S. Assessment of change in knowledge about research methods among delegates attending research methodology workshop. Perspect Clin Res 2018;9:83-90.

In their article, Assessment of change in knowledge about research methods among delegates attending research methodology workshop, Drs. Drs. Manisha Shrivastava, Nehal Shah, Seema Navaid delve into what research methodology workshops aim to work towards and how the content of these workshops have a good influence in developing knowledge bases of participants.

Conducting research in today's age is a very important part of both academics and practice- and an area of which the methodology is still not clearly laid out. On reading this article, you will understand why these workshops are important, at-least until there is a formalized curriculum implementing the same as part of regular course structures. You might even be surprised at how students failed to answer certain questions both basic and important to research. So, do read on and you will be positively influenced to participate in more of these workshops to aid your research.

Read the detailed blog post More Interesting Articles on our blog

You can find this article here.

From QMed’s Calendar

Regular workshops at institutions:

• Bhartiya Vidyapeeth Dental College (full day workshop) - 14th June - 29 participants

The 100 PGs project: (For more details - click here)

• Reference Management with Mendeley, for Seth GS Medical College & KEM Hospital students - 3rd June. Ten PG students attended each of the workshop.

Our 100 PGs project is almost complete, with only eight more residents left to reach out to.

Lectures

• KEM- Research Methodology Workshop Lecture for first year residents - 26th June

• B.K.L. Walawalkar Rural Medical College, Sawarde, Chiplun - 27th June

Around 50 participants attended each of the lectures.

QMed Participates

• A field volunteer from GlobalGiving, Cibi Poonguntan, visited us to understand the nature of what we do and to help us with ideas to do better with GlobalGiving, where we raise funds. Together we made a visit to KEM Hospital Mumbai where we have delivered several lectures and conducted a few workshops. We were heartened to see the doctors and residents acknowledge the importance and essential character of our work, and mention that it has helped them all. However, we also noticed that not too many faculty felt the need for further developing and strengthening the preliminary concepts that we teach in our lectures. The fact that they feel it is adequate and that they believe that students learn everything else on their own, worried us. We need to address this problem! Cibi visited our office later and told us ways to go about engaging our participants, the questions we could ask to gather good feedback, and platforms from where we can source good volunteers and interns. A big thank you to GlobalGiving for helping us with such visits!

• Vasumathi and Nandini attended a workshop- Transforming NGOs using technology on the 13th of June, 2018. It was an informative workshop delivered by the team members of Eternus Solutions. The importance of social media for promoting the work and the reach of NGOs cannot be denied anymore today- this was pertinently described beginning with the instance of the clean-up of the Versova beach in Mumbai. Our team got to know a lot of useful ways to handle and use social media for our work, such as the proper use of hashtags and handles. We hope to learn more with another interactive session where we will understand more about how their product - Gokarma can help us with their technology.

• Vasumathi and Nandini attended a legal workshop for compliance of NGOs by the Center for Advancement of Philanthropy on the 19th of June. It was an enlightening session where we learned that to be completely compliant, we need to be on our toes and stay abreast with several legal requirements, which seem to change a tad too often.