Annual Report

A Year Gone By: Reminiscing with gratitude and looking forward with hope

A documentation of our achievements, challenges, dreams for the forthcoming year and sincere gratitude to our donors and supporters.


Welcome to the Annual Report of QMed Knowledge Foundation for 2021-2022. This was the second year of the pandemic. While we had done a lot during the previous year, (the first year of the pandemic), there was a lot we could not do. Mainly reaching our courses out to all those who needed it, because they were too immersed in managing Covid and its implications.

This year we wished to take a component of the National Medical Commission’s document – “Competency based undergraduate curriculum for the Indian Medical Graduate” and sensitize every institution towards this. In Section 3.4.4 of this document, it specifies that every medical graduate must:

Demonstrate ability to search (including through electronic means), and critically evaluate the medical literature and apply the information in the care of the patient”

This year started with what none of us would have ever expected in our lifetimes. The pandemic and the lockdown. From about the second week of March 2020, as there were rumblings about possible lockdowns, we started getting prepared for working from home. And just as we had all our plans ready, the lockdown was announced. We really felt relieved that we had done our planning in advance.

We had planned a complete revamping of our online courses and the movement of these courses to our own platform. Also this year we had the release of the new PubMed and we needed to make our courses with the new front end. In April and May, we re-created all the presentations by breaking the lessons into smaller fragments. We had planned to have short modules so that busy residents and doctors could view one video at a time, when they had breaks.

Welcome to the Annual Report of QMed Knowledge Foundation for 2019-20. Our “Learn with us” initiative grows steadily. This year we were thrilled to have started our institutional workshops in AIIMS Bhubaneswar, and soon followed by one in an ICMR institution in Bhubaneswar. What was special about these? The invitation to AIIMS came from the Director herself – after hearing a lecture I delivered in Mumbai. And as for ICMR, this is the first time any ICMR institution invited us to conduct a workshop. And some participants expressed their view that every ICMR institution should go through our workshop. We added two new online courses this year, and we had on board the Manipal Academy of Higher Education as our first academic institution to enable access to our courses for their faculty and students. Out of many lectures that I delivered this year, two that I did at an event for Nurses was special. More than 200 nurses participated in this event which was part of a program for their learning about systematic reviews. That is a great development indeed.

Welcome to the Annual Report of QMed Knowledge Foundation for 2018-19. This year is very special as we launched our first Online Course. It has happened after years of trials and tribulations. We launched “Mastering PubMed: Basics” in the month of May 2019, hosting it on the platform of “Mediknit” – a Bengaluru based organization that hosts several ELearning courses for various medical bodies. An added bonus was that in the very first year, we had an institutional sign up too – the Association of Minimal Access Surgeons of India (AMASI) signed up for the course for all its members. We have had several good testimonials for the course too. In March 2019, Mediknit helped us record two more courses to go online – “Mastering PubMed: Advanced” and “Reference Management with Mendeley

This year again had quite a few firsts for QMed. 2017-18 was an eventful year for QMed. We took part in 30 lectures and workshops, reaching out to over 1700 participants. 2017 earmarked our first international workshop in Myanmar between 10th and 11th November. A lot of good workshops came our way - a workshop for Chest specialists, organized by a group from the American Thoracic Society and another for nursing personnel at MGM medical college. Then, we recorded our first E-Learning (Online) course this year.

This year was very special for QMed. We had a big Undergraduate events list – the conferences – Medicon at Lucknow, SIMSCON (at Manakula Vinayagar, Puducherry), Illuminati (at AFMC, Pune), SPLASH (at Lady Hardinge, Delhi) and an event at the Grant Medical College, Mumbai. We had special workshops for the Rotaract Club of Caduceus, Mumbai and Quest – at Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore.

Welcome to the Eighth Annual Report of QMed Knowledge Foundation!

This year we experienced the feeling of “the break of a dawn and lights beginning to glow” as several of our dreams are coming true. One of our major dreams and priorities is for Undergraduate students of medicine (and health sciences).This year, we conducted seven workshops for this group! We wanted to raise our levels of help to assist Systematic Reviewers and Guideline developers. We worked with three such teams (one – an international group)!

Welcome to this year’s Annual Report. This is the seventh year for QMed, and we have achieved a lot, but we still have miles to go before we sleep. The significant achievements this year include our delivering 60 lectures across the country (the highest number so far), our participation in the Cochrane Colloquium in Hyderabad, where a group from the Collaboration earnestly helped us raise funds. We raised a modest amount, but more importantly we gained international visibility and it led us to get some good collaborators for help with systematic review searches. I was also invited by a group that conducts MECOR – a week long workshop on research methods to deliver a lecture on searching and managing references. MECOR is an initiative of the American Thoracic Society. The group found this lecture so useful that they plan to video record it in the next year for a larger
QMed’s dream is to see that every human takes responsibility for his or her health by understanding what works best to stay healthy and to manage diseases or health conditions. Doctors and health professionals need to know how to find the best evidence, and then use their clinical learning, expertise and judgment, along with the best evidence, to treat patients. Consumers and patients also need to learn how to find the best evidence and then discuss their treatment options with their doctors. Doctors and consumers should ideally work together, using the best available evidence to make decisions.  

This year was very special for QMed, as we completed five years in December 2012. The five years have been a period of steady growth and achievements.  Having delivered around more than 100 lectures and also detailed workshops, on searching for literature and evidence, to an audience of more than 8000 health professionals and students, we feel poised to reach out to a much larger target. During this year, we took stock of the situation and did a lot of important activities, as well as planning.    

       
 

I am happy to present to you the Annual Report for the third Financial Year of operations. While we continued to do several workshops and lectures, there are certain highlights of this year that I would like to share. We did preconference workshops in two Undergraduate Student Conferences. We always accept such requests because we believe that if we educate this audience today, they will evolve into better health professionals. I presented a poster at the Annual Cochrane Colloquium this year (held in Madrid, Spain) and again went through several learning opportunities which will translate into better learning for our friends in India.

This year we have trained more than 1500 people. We have conducted around 50 training programs & lectures for PubMed, Cochrane Library & UpToDate across the country in various cities like Ahmedabad, Ambala, Bangalore, Calicut, Chandigarh, Chennai, Dehra Dun, Hyderabad, Kalwa, Kanpur, Khandala, Mumbai, Nagpur, Patna & Pune.
 
 
I am happy to share with all of you that in the second year of our establishment and work, we have scaled up our lectures and workshops to a good number, reaching out to nearly 1000 students & professionals with these. Nothing of course is “enough” for us, but we can move step by step, since our work depends on funding as well as the cooperation and participation from institutions. Two very important achievements this year are that I received a partial fellowship to attend the International Congress of Medical Librarianship in Brisbane Australia, an event where I get to learn lots more to come and share out here; and I was selected as an “investee” by UnLtd India – an organization that coaches Non-Profit Organizations to reach their full potential. Both these achievements this year, I am sure will do a lot to help us at QMed change things for you!