QMedCONNECT: July- August 2010

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: July- August 2010

Dear friends,

In the last issue I said that change is an inevitable component of our lives. This time I need to add that not only is it inevitable, but with it things sometimes go off track. We are going through one of those phases, where we are flooded with work and are parallely working on our sharpened and specific goals too. With Girish Kunkur moving out of the Foundation's employment, it has added a little more to our challenges! One of the effects of the change was that we had to club two issues of our newsletter to reach you this month. I am sorry for this delay, but it was tough. Having said this, I am very confident that we are moving towards the best directions. In the last couple of months, I have interacted with many people in the academic circles and have received a lot of encouragement. I believe the coming two months will be hectic for us as we work out the best plans to do a lot for medical students and teachers and most importantly work out funding methods.

We have two important plans to launch soon. One is to give a 90 minute talk on literature searching at as many medical colleges and educational institutions in the coming year. The other is to launch a "Friends of QMedKF" initiative. Any individual or institution that becomes a Friend of QMedKF will have a symbiotic relationship with us. More details on this as soon as we are ready.

I do look forward to your support in any ways that you can for our venture.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Our New Initiative

We have planned a new initiative which we are launching with immediate effect. This initiative has emerged out of three talks that our CEO delivered recently which were well appreciated. The initiative is to deliver a 90 minute talk on the importance of literature searching in medical practice and research, and to share some foundational ideas on how to do a good literature search. We hope that these talks will inspire every institution to offer structured programs to all their students and staff, with our help. While we may ourselves need to conduct the first couple of programs, we would like to train potential trainers in each institution to help all others.

We request interested institutions to get in touch with us. For institutions outside Mumbai , we will do the lectures after fixing around 4-5 lectures in a city / town. We'd request each institution to support this with whatever honorarium they pay to a guest faculty. We will take care of our travel expenses.

Our Forthcoming Programs / Lectures

September 7, 2010: PubMed Basics. Chandigarh. A sponsored event

September 15-17: Lecture on literature searching in various medical colleges and institutions in Chennai

September 18: PubMed Basics. Delhi. A sponsored event

September 25: PubMed Basics. Mumbai. A sponsored event

September 26: "Playschool of Biostatistics".

This program is especially for those who find Statistics challenging. We have an invited speaker - Dr. Puneet Gupta, a lecturer in Dentistry from Indore who will conduct this program. He is passionate about promoting a research culture and wishes to help people overcome the fear of statistics.

Venue:
The Hub. UnLtd India
4th Floor, Candelar Building, 26 St. John Baptist Road, Near Mount Mary Steps,
Bandra (W), , India.
Mumbai, Maharashtra 400 050
(Behind Lilavati Hospital)

Time: 9 AM - 12 Noon

Participation: Rs. 200/- (The amount will be treated as a donation to the Foundation)

Other Events of Interest

11th-15th Sep 2010: Workshop on Scientific Writing. NIH supported course, conducted by faculty of SGPGI, Lucknow, at Goa. More details

29th-30th Sep 2010: 1st Oct 2010: Conference - KRM 2010 - Information Resources, Services and Practices organized jointly by Tata Memorial Hospital & HLAI, at TMH, MumbaiMore details

8th-12th Nov 2010: Systematic Review Protocol Completion and Review Update Workshop. Conducted by the SACN, CMC Vellore. More details

17th - 20th Nov 2010: Third National Bioethics Conference, organized by the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. More details

3rd-5th Dec 2010: Workshop on 'Introduction to Clinical Trials and Good Clinical Practices'. NIH supported course, conducted by faculty of SGPGI, Lucknow, at Goa. 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

Rathod, Sujit.

Combating plagiarism: a shared responsibility.

Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. 2010; 7:173-75.

Cut, copy, paste - is so easy to do that many people do it! We once had a journal editor sharing with us, how an author had taken one of his publications, simply reordered the paragraphs and submitted the same! While most authors do not go to this extreme, we still do see many instances of plagiarism, which we suspect are mostly due to ignorance of details. This article by Dr. Rathod specially highlights the responsibilities of the scientific community as well as observers and readers of articles to tackle this problem. He recommends steps that we need to take and specially highlights the need for awareness promotion right from the student level.

What we did –July - August 2010

Training Programs / Talks: Literature searching:

1st August, 2010: Talk on Importance of literature searching at a Research Methodology Conference organized by the IJO at the Hinduja Hospital, Mumbai

7th August, 2010: Lecture on Literature searching and PubMed at Seth GS Medical College, Mumbai for PG students

10th August, 2010: Talk on literature searching for students & faculty of the KJ Somaiya Medical College, Mumbai

14th August, 2010: Talk on literature searching at a Clinical Research Methodology Workshop at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai

Sessions at UnLtd India

In July-Aug, our CEO had around 6 -7 sessions with UnLtd India - (where she is an investee - getting access to many thinkers and experts). Some sessions were group based, some were one-to-one and covered issues relating to strategizing, budgeting and more.

Document Delivery of Journal Articles

In the months of July - August 2010, we delivered 284 articles to individual members, libraries and corporate clients. The total number of documents delivered since April 2010 is 674.

Funding

For any not-for-profit organization, sustenance is a challenge every now and then. Assurance of basic needs (infrastructure and salaries) makes a huge difference to the time we can commit to carry out activities. Contributions from those who sincerely believe that our activities are vital will be deeply appreciated.
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

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

- Zora Neale Hurston (American folklorist, anthropologist, and author)

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

We have added 50 new sites in the last two months (July & August) and the total number of sites is about 3136.

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.