QMedCONNECT: August 2009

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: August 2009

Dear friends,

At the time this issue reaches you, I will be attending a big event - "The International Congress of Medical Librarians". This event is held once in four years and medical librarians from all over the world gather for this event. I was really fortunate to get a waiver of the conference registration (the organizers offered a developing country scholarship and I got this based on my application). I will also be attending three pre-conference workshops and I believe that I will have a lot to offer the Indian health professionals after learning from these. One is on the librarian's role in systematic reviews, another is on various hidden resources on the web, and the third on integrating various offerings for small libraries.

More importantly, this issue focuses on something that all of you would have seen in the papers recently - about a new event - "The Joy of Giving Week", (to become a much needed annual event). Do visit the website and do not miss the small video ad film depicting the theme.

We at QMed Knowledge Foundation wish to "Give" during the Joy of Giving Week and also to raise funds to do a lot of things either free or at still lower charges than we are currently offering. We will keep you abreast of all ideas that we come up with, in our website, and through emails. We hope that something really good comes up from this for all our health professionals!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

The Joy of Giving Week

"It is more blessed to give than to receive" is a quote that I often read in Enid Blyton story books in childhood. And when most of us get a lot, it is important to give back. When we at QMed heard about this concept, we got really excited. We decided to work at giving something during this week. We may conduct one or two free training programs in a small town medical college; and we may do something more too. We will announce our plans in the coming weeks.

Addressing the community of senior health professionals, we'd like to ask, "Would you like to join us?" For instance, if each of you could donate one day's salary/practice fee to us.
For those who have used QMed's offerings at any time and given us great feedback, would you join us too?
Students, would you donate a day's pocket money (or any amount you'd like)?

If all of you believe in our cause and help us raise funds, we would like to utilize the amount collected to do one or more of the following:

• Run training programs in colleges that face funds crunch for such activities

• Build an online library of "QMedLINKS" for a number of diseases. (For every disease, we would create hyperlinks to free articles as well as abstracts of large evidence based studies - Systematic Reviews and articles on Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment and Prognosis)

• Help medical libraries load their journal collection details in PubMed so that when one does a search, one can restrict to articles available in the library collection

Do give us more ideas, and do help us find really needy recipients. We are all ready to move! If we raise around Rs. 10 lakhs, we think we can do lots of activities for a year. We will announce more details on our website in early September. Meanwhile we hope to get feedback with donations and ideas!

What we did – August 2009

Training programs: PubMed - Basics and Talks on Literature Searching

Programs conducted

In August 2009, we conducted programs at
a) The Gujarat Cancer Research Institute, Ahmedabad
b) The Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute, Delhi
c) AIIMS (Oncology Department), Delhi
d) Lotus College of Optometry, Mumbai

The first three were sponsored and we thank the sponsors for this gesture. We would like to especially appreciate Lotus College, for making our program mandatory for their Postgraduate Students of Optometry.

Some of the feedback we received:

• Like the human mind, we have been using hardly 2% of PubMed functions. I wish I knew it earlier. This should be - must be a part of the PG syllabus.

• The presentation was very apt to the current day scenario of evidence based study. The presentation led us into a new world of PubMed which I thought was only a search engine, the results of which were not generally fruitful.

• A comprehensive delivery of a not very well understood skill.

• Very useful and feel such programs should be held regularly.

• Excellent, innovative program. Should be a must in each medical department.

Forthcoming Programs

We will be conducting three programs in September in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kochi, again through sponsors.

We invite medical colleges/hospitals to contact us for organizing a program for PG students, faculty and health professionals. Please check out details at our website.

Document Delivery Of Journal Articles

In the month of August 2009, we delivered 153 articles to individual members, libraries and corporate clients. The total number of documents delivered since April this year is 815.

Donations to QMed Knowledge Foundation

We accept donations only 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.

Special Announcement!!

1. September 26-27 - "Indian Pediatrics" announces the 1st Workshop on the "ART AND SCIENCE OF WRITING A PAPER", at Auditorium, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi. More details

2. November 21-22 - 12th Workshop on "BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS AND COMMUNICATION", at Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram (Wardha).More details

3. MDConsult. Doctors in India can avail of access to MDConsult at special rates, thanks to the efforts of the HELP Library. With MDConsult, you get access to about 50 reference books, 70 journals (including Clinics), Practice guidelines and lots more. For more details click here.

4. Supercourse Lectures. Supercourse is a repository of lectures on global health and prevention designed to improve teaching prevention. Supercourse has a network of over 64000 scientists in 174 countries, who are sharing for free a library of 3623 lectures in 30 languages. Supercourse 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 the entire content, and we are willing to copy it - as requested by Ronald and give it to interested individuals/institutions. 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 at info@qmedkf.org.in if you wish to receive a copy.

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.

Article of the Month:

Sivapathasundharam .

Ethics in presentations: teach the teachers first

Available from: www.ijdr.in/text.asp?2008/19/4/283/44525

The author writes about presentations in conferences and highlights the importance of quoting references. – a practice that is by and large either neglected or minimized in Indian presentation. He emphasizes that by quoting references the presenter shows that he has done enough reading and that he is not plagiarising. He also stresses that conference scientific committees and teachers should insist on adequate referencing. We hope that these communities take note!

Quote of the Month

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
- Steve Ballmer

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

We have added 30 new sites in the last month and the total number of sites is about 2455.

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.