QMedCONNECT: Highlights of September - October 2020

From our Founder's Desk

Welcome to our September-October newsletter! 

The last two months have been busy in different ways. We had to do some technical revamping of our website in October and so our newsletter and blog posts had to wait, and we bring you a joint issue.

In October we launched a new project. We have started a major effort to encourage undergraduate students of all health sciences streams to enrol in our online courses in order to get a strong foundation to literature searching and referencing. To make this sustainable, we have started a crowdfunding campaign to encourage people to donate towards this goal. We also raised funds through our international donors and already have funds for over a 100 students. 

Students are asked to give a token donation of Rs. 250/- only. We offer incentives for them to win back this amount or even more, by passing the courses with reasonable or good scores. We believe that if they give a donation, they give a commitment to learn. But if they do well, they can get rewards and thus learn and get rewarded! Read more about this here 

To spread the word, we teamed up with three organizations comprising UG students - Aspire-GSMC, Jignyasa and Switch India, and organized an event during Daan Utsav, on October 4, 2020. We invited students from all these organizations to a webinar and had a couple of doctors, a nurse, a pharmacist, a physiotherapist and a recently qualified MD to speak to them about how literature searching is very important in their careers. So far 21 students have expressed interest, and eight of them have signed up for the courses. We do need to spread the awareness much more, to encourage many. 

Do stay in touch with us, and enjoy the rest of this issue!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

DY Patil Vidyapeeth

Date: 22-10-2020
No of Participants: 20

JSS Dental College Mysuru

Date: 01-10-2020
No of Participants: 30

JSS Dental College Mysuru

Date: 28-09-2020
No of Participants: 30

SWITCH India NGO

Date: 06-09-2020
No of Participants: 35

Research Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Countries

Biomedical research in developing countries: Opportunities, methods, and challenges

• Masudur Rahman, Uday C. Ghoshal, Krish Ragunath, Gareth Jenkins, Mesbahur Rahman, Cathryn Edwards, Mahmud Hasan, and Simon D Taylor-Robinson

Indian J Gastroenterol. 2020 Jun 30 : 1–11.

Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12664-020-01056-5

This time, we chose to highlight this article as it is written by authors from various countries both developing and developed. The authors have covered several aspects of the importance of research starting. Importantly they have covered the relationship between research and clinical practice, - very often brushed away. They have not only mentioned the challenges, but have shared opportunities too.

The article covers the following:

Why Research is necessary: It is essential for improving global health, health equity, and economic development. Research capacity strengthening will always contribute towards national development and ways to deal with national health problems. Research forms the platform for evidence-based medicine.

By: Dipti Suvarna & Vasumathi Sriganesh

 Read more.

Online courses versus live training - what do you really want?

I had been pondering on an interesting aspect of human and organizational thought (and response) patterns. Between 2008 and 2017 when we only did real time lectures and live workshops we had a lot of people asking us - "Don't you have your courses online?  That would make things so much easier." 

We put our courses online in the second half of 2017. More recently we moved them to our own platform - www.qmedcourses.in and did a lot to spread awareness of the courses. We did our best to inform all those who attended our workshops and also have been writing to institutions.

I am very grateful that we have around 1500 plus people enrolled in a span of 2..5 months. It is also important to note that this is a fraction of the real number of people needing these courses. Of those who need them, many know that they need them but many do not know this!

Read more.