QMedCONNECT: February 2011

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: February 2011

Dear friends,

We are a little late in getting this issue of QMedCONNECT to you. It seems to be a part of the effects of the growing phase of an organization! We are now regularly filled with requests for lectures and training programs. Working out the details for the "Friends of QMed Foundation" program is keeping us on our toes! Preliminary discussions with several institutions and individuals has been very very encouraging.

I am happy to share, that I had an opportunity to interact with the people behind the Cochrane Library, just as this issue rolls out to you. More about this in our next issue. Meanwhile we are strengthening our working with the South Asian Cochrane Network & Centre at CMC Vellore, to help spread awareness and usage of this excellent resource for Evidence.

We are also working on our Funding proposals, and we hope to start our new programs in April. We seek the best wishes and support of all our readers!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Do You Know?

Searching PubMed using MeSH - made easy

PubMed has made searching easier for you. Here is a simple tip. If you wish to do a search for Bisphosphonates in Osteoporosis, go to PubMed and click "MeSH database" on the lower right side

In this MeSH database page

• Type Bisphosphonates in the Search box and click Search

• You will get a result Diphosphonates (a synonym). Click "Add to search builder" (on the right side of the page)

• The term Diphosphonates[Mesh] appears in the search builder box above

• Next - in the Main search box, replace Bisphosphonates with Osteoporosis and click Search

• You will get six terms; check the first one "Osteoporosis".Once again click "Add to search builder"

• In the Search builder box - you will see ("Diphosphonates"[Mesh]) AND "Osteoporosis"[Mesh]

• Click Search PubMed.You get over 3000 results

• Additional tip - change [MeSH] to [Major] for both search terms. The number of results reduces to over 2000.

• Use the Limits link (just above the search box) to limit your search

Try this with different diseases and drugs!

Forthcoming Training Programs/Lectures:

16th March, 2011: Training program - UpToDate - at Malabar Institute of Medical Sciences, Calicut

23rd March, 2011: Lecture on literature searching at a "Re-orientation Training Programme in Research Methodology" for Ayurvedic faculty, organized by the Dept of Clinical Pharmacology, TN Medical College, under the Aegis of the Dept of Ayush

24th March, 2011: Lecture on literature searching at PHARMATECH 2011, organized by the Seth GS Medical College.

27th March, 2011: Lecture on literature searching at a Research Methodology workshop organized by the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology, at Aurangabad

Other Events of Interest

South Asian Cochrane Network & Centre - Workshops on Systematic Reviews - More details

Clinical Research Workshop Series. Conducted by the Public Health Foundation of India. More details

Medicon 2011- May 11th - 14th 2011: Medicon is an annual international research conference for undergraduate medical students, organized in India. It presents a platform for young scientists and future doctors to meet, interact and present their research. More details

If you are organizing or know about other conferences, pre-conference workshops or training programs related to medical research, do let us know; we would like to include these in our website and newsletter.

Resources for You:

Supercourse Lectures. Supercourse is a repository of lectures on Global Health and Prevention designed to improve the teaching of Prevention. Supercourse is a library of 3623 lectures in 30 languages. It has been produced at the WHO Collaborating Center University of Pittsburgh, with core developers Ronald LaPorte and others.

Our Foundation has received a CD of entire content, and are distributing it for free to institutions during our training programs and also to anyone requesting for the same. This will be useful if you do not wish to view all lectures on the Internet for various reasons. Please get in touch with us atinfo@qmedkf.org.in if you wish to receive a copy.

Article of the Month

Cleveland AD

Miles to go before we sleep: education, technology, and the changing paradigms in health information*

J Med Libr Assoc. 2011 January; 99(1): 61–69

The author discusses the urgent need to upgrade health information based degrees where she stresses that while the important principles of library science need to be taught, the curriculum should now include concepts of healthcare as well as other information centred disciplines. In India, it is not about "upgrading", as we do not have a health information degree; we have Library & Information Sciences as a broad discipline. What we need for our medical colleges and institutions is a set of professionals who undergo training of the type described in this article

QMedKF's comment:
Our CEO had presented a similar paper in a conference of the Medical Library Association of India. Please see her article -Laying a Foundation for Clinical Librarianship in India

What we did – February 2011

Training Programs / Talks: Literature searching:

5th February, 2011 - PubMed Advanced, at the Institute of Rotary Cancer Hospital, AIIMS, New Delhi

6th February, 2011 - PubMed Basics, at the Institute for Nephro-Urology, BMC, Bangalore

17th February, 2011 - UpToDate - at Sir Gangaram Hospital, Delhi

19th February, 2011 - Lecture at the National Conference on Data Mining in the fields of Agro informatics, Medical Informatics, and Bioinformatics, at the Allana Institute of Management Studies, Pune

21st February, 2011 - Lecture on literature searching at Bharatiya Vidyapeeth, Pune

Document Delivery of Journal Articles

In the month of February 2011, we delivered 109 articles to individual members, libraries and corporate clients. The total number of documents delivered since April 2010 is 1266.

Funding

We accept donations by cheques in favour of Quality Medical Knowledge Foundation. You may send the cheques to our address, or you could ask us for our account details. You will get the applicable IT Exemption for donations under Section 80G of the Indian Income Tax Act.

Quote of the Month

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Alan Dundes (Folklorist)

Directory of Indian Medical Sites (www.indianmedicalsites.in)

We have added 25 new sites in February and the total number of sites is 3250.

We invite volunteers to add new sites. If you would like to help, do write to us and we will send you a set of instructions that will make it easier for you to work. Please write "Volunteering for Indian Medical Sites" in the Subject of the email.