QMedCONNECT Newsletter: February 2016

---

Dear friends

With great pleasure, I would like to share two pieces of good news. This month, I got an intimation from the Maharashtra Medical Council, that I have been included in their list of Specialty Speakers for Continuing Medical Education programs! This means that CMEs that give credit points for participants can include my lectures, and that results in a larger reach out for us. The other news is that a new initiative of the Cochrane Collaboration's training activities, includes us. Do check out details at the Cochrane Training Page. We are really excited about both. Over the last eight years, our work and the support from many of you, has helped us climb steps - one by one - and reach this stage.

We are also thankful to some medical colleges and events for responding to our request, to give us an honorarium of Rs. 5000/- for the lectures we deliver. In most cases, due to constraints of the system, the honorarium is much lower, but currently four entities have given us the larger amount we requested for. This amount takes care of the time and effort we put into updating / customizing the content.

I was thrilled to be invited for the first Alumni Day of the Lotus College of Optometry. The Principal Dr Prema Chande had taken care to invite every faculty who delivered lectures for the students of B.Optom and the M.Optom degrees. I really enjoyed and appreciated being a part of the event.

Two people visited QMed's office this month, just to say hello and interact with us. One was Dr. Diana Schmidt, who I know as a co-member of the Indian Association for Medical Informatics. She is a retired Prof from Germany, and has been interested in QMed's work for quite some time. She has also registered as a Friend of QMed and has donated to us on several occasions. The other was Dr Rajan Kumar Barnawal from Nagpur. He is doing his residency and had taken guidance for searching the literature for his thesis. He made the effort to visit us and give a donation. We enjoyed having Dr. Diana and Dr Rajan visit us.

And finally, I'd like to share that after years of struggling to get an economical method of enabling our Indian donors to donate using the options of credit cards / debit cards or netbanking facilities, we have finally activated this with Instamojo. Donors can now give us their donations online through this link. With just one month to go for this Financial Year to come to an end, do consider giving a donation (and saving on your taxes!),  to encourage the building of a generation that engages in evidence based healthcare!

Vasumathi Sriganesh

---

From Our Blog

In Jan 2016, I attended the event – KRM (Knowledge Resources Management) – organized by the Tata Memorial Centre’s Digital Library, with the Health Science Library Association of India.  You would love reading this latest post on our blog about the role libraries can play in using digital contents and ensuring copyright compliance.

---

Did You Know

 

TRIP Database

 

Trip is a tool for you to find and use high-quality clinical research evidence. Any search performed in TRIP fetches results from a number of resources like the Cochrane Library, Evidence Summaries, individual journals and more. Once the results are displayed, one can filter them by TRIP's filters - either secondary research (systematic reviews, guidelines etc) or primary research - (Journal articles, Trials etc) or basic information from textbooks. Results can be further refined in a number of ways, saved, and exported.

 

Apart from such evidence based resources, TRIP fetches results from other resource categories - Images, Videos, Education, Patient Information, News, PubMed Clinical Queries and Dynamed. (Access to some of these is only available with a subscription, which appears to be surprisingly low). A great meta-search engine!

 

---

Interesting Reading

Kumar AM, Chinnakali P, Shewade H, Gupta V, Nagpal P, Harries AD.
Short EpiData course: do participants use the data entry tool two years post-training?
Public Health Action. 2015 Dec 21;5(4):261-5. PMID: 26767181

Dr Ajay Kumar, the first author of this article, shared this study with us, since lots of it was relevant to the scenarios we faced with training. The study describes how the authors conducted workshops on the use of the tool EpiData for data entry of research data, and then studied the impact two years later. They discuss how accuracy in data entry is vital for research, but making students  aware of this importance is not done routinely. Much emphasis is given to data analysis, but unless the data is accurate, it is flawed!. And again - how tools like EpiData (free to download) are not taught to ensure that the process of data entry is accurate and can be double checked. The two year follow up results were interesting. Since the authors had a carefully selected group of trainees, several of them not only used the tool, but have also taught the use of the tool to others! We at QMed are excited about this, and are hoping to learn how we can follow such a model.

 

---

Story

 

Anmol Sharma has recently started his Internship at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, after finishing his MBBS. Anmol has worked in translational research in healthcare, HIV, Infectious diseases, medical education and neurobiology. He aspires to become a surgeon in the future.

Anmol attended our workshop for medical students, in the year 2013, and we were delighted when he recently, wrote to us and shared this:

"I consider myself really lucky to have found you and the QMed team, early in my career in 2013 at "MEDICON" (a workshop for UG students) at the UCMS Delhi. I have regularly been using what was learned in that four hour lesson, till now.

I have done multiple projects with proper referencing and literature searching, winning commendations everywhere . The idea of straining the vast amount of data available by just a few clicks has made me understand medical research and writing, in a far better way . Today I enjoy research , taking part in multiple research paper presentations and winning studentships - all credits to the QMed team . The one to one live demo teaching and practical application made the concepts absolutely crystal clear to me . Hoping to attend more of the QMed workshops ahead."

 

---

From QMed’s Calendar

Talks on Literature Search, Referencing, Citing

1. YMT College of Ayurveda, Kharghar - 8th Feb:  About 40 PG students

2. Terna Medical College, Nerul - 16th Feb: Around 40 PG teachers

3. LTMMC, Sion - 25th Feb - Around 38 participants - mainly PG students, and a few teachers

Starting from the event at LTMMC, we have made a practice of asking questions and noting responses to these. We asked how many had earlier used  MeSH, Single Citation Matcher,  Cochrane Library and any Reference Manager.  Not one of the 38 had ever used these tools earlier, though about six had heard of the Cochrane Library. (We plan to compile such responses over the coming lectures)

Events attended

1. Vasumathi Sriganesh attended an event  - "Social Business Summit - "Empowering NGOs for Future" - organized by the Don Bosco Institute of Management & Research. There were interesting talks and panel discussions on empowerment of NGOs and the DBIMR shared with us, the work done by their Management Students on Social projects during their PG degree course. (It is mandatory for them!) . We hope to use the learning from this and explore possibility of having a student from DBIMR engage with us sometime.

2. Lakshmi Padmanabhan attended a training on 'Google Ad Grants' organized by the Google Ad Grants training team (India) specially for the non-profit sector. The team gave an overview of the various methods which NGOs can use to  leverage Google ads to promote their work, raise funds and appeal to volunteers. We hope to leverage this learning in the near future, to generate funds for our activities

Copyright © QMed Knowledge Foundation – Trust registered with the Charity Commissioner Mumbai – Registration No: E-24663