Every medical teacher would have definitely seen the "AETCOM book" (2018). Brought out by the erstwhile Medical Council of India, it is now in the website of the newer entity - the National Medical Council. AETCOM stands for Attitude, Ethics and Communication (AETCOM) competencies. The booklet is a 94 page document prepared by the Academic Cell of the Council. The guide includes a bunch of new competencies to the existing ones, in preparing Indian Medical Graduates of high standards. The third section or Section 3 of the document is about "non-core competencies" that are considered highly desirable. Within this, Section…

QMed Knowledge Foundation was registered as a Trust in December 2007. In 2008, when we had our formal inauguration, I had mentioned in my talk – “We aim to become redundant”. And we have actually paved the first steps towards this!   QMed can definitely become redundant (at least in its current Avtaar), in the not too distant future. This - if every institution teaching health science courses has librarians and faculty who can teach the skills of literature searching and referencing. They will need to teach these in depth and mentor students for these activities. This simply must happen…

When searching online databases, using the words - AND, OR and NOT, is a common practice. The terms AND, OR and NOT are called "Boolean Operators".  "But this is so simple and basic. Why are you writing a blog post about this?" - you might ask. I write this blog post because it is important to use Boolean Operators correctly while searching. It is important that anyone who searches online should know how these terms work. Everyone thinks it is simple. But many people make mistakes in their usage. I am not talking about the inadvertent slips (I make them…