QMedCONNECT: January- February 2008

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: January - February 2008

Dear friends,

Welcome to QMed Knowledge Foundation's inaugural Newsletter. Our Foundation was registered on the 19th of December, 2007 and we had an inaugural launch on the 12th of January, 2008 at the Nehru Centre.

The event was a great success and ever since then we have been working hard at our strategic planning and prioritising - a very interesting and challenging activity. Our Directory of Indian Medical Sites is definitely one thing that will keep us on our toes as we have set a huge goal for ourselves. We have big plans for training activities and outreach of our other regular activities too. One concern that we do hope to address is about medical libraries. There are too many in India that face different crunches and issues, and we hope that by providing some platforms for interactions, and advocacy, we can make a difference to these entities and the professionals that manage them. It is a big task, but we hope that in small steps we will do good things.

It is interesting that with India having had public Internet access since 1995-96, a lot of healthcare professionals have found it challenging to retrieve relevant medical literature easily. After every lecture on literature searching that I deliver, or a training program that my colleague Parvati or I conduct, we have doctors thanking us for making things simpler. We have had some telling us "you have made us realize that we were ignorant" or "we were doing a hotch-potch job prior to your training". Almost all of them have reinforced the need for such training programs. And yet, - our programs have not spread the way they ideally should. The reasons seem always to be based either on lack of prioritization or lack of budgets. Advocacy seems to be the first thing we need to work on.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

The Launch:

January 12, 2008 saw us all at the "Hall of Harmony", Nehru Centre, Mumbai. We had a ceremonial launch of the QMed Knowledge Foundation. Several well wishers joined us - our clients, librarians, doctors and family members.

The evening began with an invocation by Mrs.Parthasarathy. Girish Kunkur, Director Programs welcomed the speakers and the invitees.

Vasumathi Sriganesh, CEO then briefed the audience with a presentation - "Empowering the Medical Information User". She explained all activities of the Foundation , outlined its future plans and invited support from everyone present in the audience. The event also witnessed the launch of a major creation of the Foundation - a Directory of Indian Medical Sites with an objective of making it the most authentic directory of Indian resources on the web.

Dr. Y. K. Amdekar, Consultant Pediatrician (Hon. Pediatrician- Jaslok Hospital & Breach Candy Hospital , Mumbai) - one of the speakers highlighted the need for doctors to be able to get information updates from and through the Internet, with ease. He commended QMed's initiative in wanting to train the medical community on searching for medical literature.

Dr. K. G. Nair, Consultant Cardiologist (Academic Director,Holy Family Hospital , Mumbai and Former Director-Research, Hinduja Hospital , Mumbai) spoke on the importance of research, and how it was imperative to be good at finding information as well as writing and publishing good research. He set a big target for QMed - "to go global" and reach out its services world over!

Parvati Iyer, Director Projects proposed a Vote of thanks

For details click here

Media Coverage Indian Express – Jan 14, 2008
A dose of information- These librarians help doctors search for reliable medical information and case studies from across the world.

More details

What we did- January - February 2008

Training programs: PubMed - Basics and Talks on Literature Searching

Vasumathi Sriganesh delivered lectures on Medical literature searching at the following events in January - February

Fellows of the GSMC-Faimer Fellowship program. Participants were faculty from several medical colleges
Indian Journal of Ophthalmology - Workshop on Medical Research Methodology
All India Ophthalmic Society Annual Conference at Bangalore
Course on Clinical Research for UG students, at Seth GS Medical College & KEM Hospital
Course on Clinical Research (ICMR sponsored) for doctors at Seth GS Medical College & KEM Hospital

Parvati Iyer took a tutorial for students of M.Optom at the Lotus College of Optometry in February.

Training inquiries
For more details or for holding training programs in your institution, please call us at 022- 40054474/ 75 or e-mail us at info@qmedkf.org.in

Upcoming events and activities

PubMed – Basics : Training Program
Sunday 6 April 2008 from 10 am to 1.30 pm
Venue: Hall of Quest, Nehru Centre, Worli, Mumbai.

Aim:
The aim of the training is to teach health professionals and Post Graduate Medical students? How to handle medical information.

Why?

- We believe that health information handled well can have a major impact on the quality of care that you give patients.
- PubMed contains information from about 4800 peer reviewed biomedical journals from the 1940s up to the present
- Searching PubMed with a structured approach leads to finding highly relevant information in minimal time

Registration
Limited registrations on a first-come-first- served basis. The Fee is Rs. 500/- for students (proof of studentship required) and Rs.1000/- for others. Payment can be made by cash, cheque or demand draft payable to Quality Medical Knowledge Foundation.

HIFA 2015 Campaign

QMed Knowledge Foundation has taken an initiative to support and collaborate with the HIFA2015(Healthcare Information For All by 2015) campaign (www.hifa2015.org). It is a global campaign with more than 1100 professionals working in over 100 countries to ensure the same worldwide. NeilPakenham-Walsh is the co-director of the Global Healthcare Information Network, which administers this campaign. "People in India are dying for lack of knowledge. We look forward to working with QMed Knowledge Foundation and others to help reduce this unnecessary suffering and move towards a future where every person in India has access to an informed healthcare provider ", he said – in an email communication to QMed KF. QMed Knowledge Foundation, with its collective experience in the health information area, plans to work for this campaign in collaboration with other NGOs that are working for better health care, especially in rural India.

Article of the Month:

Dr. Anand A.C. VSM
Swami Ramdev and scientific medicine: Losing is fine, but the lesson should not be lost!
The National Medical Journal of India, Vol No. 20, No. 5

Click to download

Quote of the Month

Hospital Bill!

"A hospital should also have a recovery room adjoining the cashier's office". Francis O'Walsh

Beauty and the Female Anatomy

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do they want, an adorable pancreas?" Jean Kerr

Directory of Indian Medical Sites

Are you looking for a single source that gives access to a wide range of Indian medical sites such as those of Doctors, Hospitals, Clinics, Polyclinics, Diagnostic Centres, Blood Banks, Pharmaceutical Companies, Health Insurance, Medical Software companies etc. Just log on towww.indianmedicalsites.in. Our ambition is to make this site as one of the most comprehensive and authentic directories and to reach out to healthcare professionals, healthcare service providers, consumers and general public all over India. You can support this initiative through a generous contribution that helps us in developing this site further, maintaining its quality and sustaining its costs. In order to ensure complete transparency, we will send youa detailed feedback on how your money is used. You will receive tax exemptions provided under 80G of the Indian Income Tax. You can pay by cheque payable to Quality Medical Knowledge Foundation”