Donor Connect: Our fortnightly updates to donors
Dear Donors - In case you have missed any of our mailers, you could check this page and catch up. And if you are someone who has stumbled upon this page for the first time, we invite you to join us in our journey. Give us a donation to sustain our work. Contribute your time/ expertise. Connect us with people who matter - in the National Medical Commission / ICMR or any of the Councils. Help us reach medical / nursing / dental / pharmacy and other colleges. In short - Become a part of the history we are creating! We welcome you!
Dec 9, 2022: Founder story – Meeting Dr Eugene Garfield
Date: Friday December 9, 2022
Category: Founder Story
Keywords: Conference, Eugene Garfield, founder story, MLA
It is natural for a student to dream of meeting his/her hero. In fact it is natural for this feeling to last much longer. It is a part of us that we don’t grow out of. So when I had the opportunity to meet Dr Eugene Garfield in person in the year 2013, on a day when I won an International Award and the day happened to be my birthday, it was like a triple bonus! How can one forget such days??
Dr Eugene Garfield (1925 – 2017), was an Information Scientist of worldwide fame. He had worked as a Librarian, and went on to produce top-notch information products like Current Contents, Science Citation Index, and several others. This was all under the organization “Institute for Scientific Information” which was later taken over by Thomson Reuters (and further to Clarivate Analytics). For students of Library & Information Sciences courses, “Eugene Garfield” was a huge role model.
As a student of Information Sciences in 1989-90 and then as a freshly qualified librarian, I used to read his works with awe – wondering how one could be so brilliant! The “Essays of an Information Scientist” and his other columns in “Current Contents” – were publications I read with reverence.
It was in May 2013 that I attended the Annual Conference of the Medical Library Association, USA. Earlier that year, I got the news that I had won an award instituted by the ICLC, UK. I was told that I would receive it at the MLA Annual event.
The Awards ceremony itself was awesome – organized perfectly going down to every minute detail. I learnt that Dr Eugene Garfield was present at the ceremony. I got a glimpse of him and wished that I could meet him, but that turned out to be difficult. I told myself that I had better be happy having at least seen him in person.
The same evening there was a special event for all award winners, at a venue away from the conference center. When I reached there, I was delighted to find that Dr Garfield and his wife were also present! The event being one with no fixed agenda, it was open for everyone to network and meet. I had ample time to chat with both of them and to tell them about QMed too. Dr Garfield’s wife was an Indian by birth and so we had several common topics to discuss. It was one of the best days in my life!
Later that year QMed started to raise funds via GlobalGiving – a US based crowd-funding platform. I wrote to Dr Garfield and made a request for a donation and we got a contribution of $500 from him (through the Thomson Reuters Foundation)! The wildest dreams of a student came true 🙂
Just four years later, in the end of February, we learnt that Dr Garfield passed away at the age of 91. We at QMed feel that good wishes and blessings of people like Dr Garfield keep us going and I hope he continues to shower his best wishes on QMed and all its beneficiaries, from the other world. After all, Eugene Garfield and I love the same domain – “Information Sciences”!
Nov 23, 2022: Program story – AIIMS Kalyani introduces our talk on Literature Searching in its Foundation Course for I MBBS
Date: Wednesday November 23, 2022
Category: Program Update
Keywords: AIIMS, Literature searching, Program story
The Foundation Course for I MBBS students – conducted by every medical college since the year 2019 – has an objective of sensitizing fresh medical students with the required knowledge and skills for their professional environment. It stresses on the medical graduate preparing to be a lifelong learner and developing strong leadership and communication skills.
In November, we received a call from AIIMS Kalyani – a medical college in the Eastern part of India, asking if we could deliver a lecture for their newly admitted I MBBS Students. We were delighted to take up this and I gave a one-hour presentation titled:
“Enjoy Learning with Extra Reading: An orientation to finding the best information resources using IT”
I stressed on the need for reading beyond textbooks. I explained about journals and other resources. I introduced them to some of the Indian textbooks and told them about the editors of these books. I stressed how each one of them read a lot, learnt about, and did lots of research. As a result of their efforts, they were on editorial teams that created textbooks which were important to all medical students in India.
I then introduced them to the fundamentals of searching online. I gave them a bird’s eye view on how tagging search terms and using Boolean operators could make a difference
AIIMS Kalyani has subscribed to QMedCourses and so I explained how students could learn in more detail from www.qmedcourses.in . The new curriculum introduced in the MBBS stresses on the need for self-learning, in addition to syllabus-based learning.
To encourage students, I asked them for a commitment to
1) Finish the first two courses in their first year (this would take just about 2-3 hours)
2) Finish the other two over the next couple of years (an involvement of about 5-6 hours)
The students have promised to go ahead. I explained how these courses could help them a lot during the MBBS as well as PG courses and then during their entire career span.
The feedback received was excellent – majority agreed that the session was effective and that they were very interested.
QMed thanks AIIMS Kalyani for organizing this session. We now plan to make a fresh recording of this talk and encourage every medical college to share it with their MBBS students
Nov 10, 2022: Sharing a donor story – S Viswanathan
Just a month after we shared a donor story, we are lucky to get another one to share with you. Again an old friend – S Viswanathan was my husband’s colleague for several years and his family and ours still share a great rapport.
Viswanathan – better known as Vishy amongst our group, has been a regular donor and often been one when I put out specific appeals. Every time we got a donation from him, we felt so good! Vishy has been another “sounding board” just like Raman – who I wrote about earlier.
When I asked Vishy what made him give QMed regularly, this is what he said:
Like many others, when I crossed 50, I started setting aside a certain percentage of my income each year for ”giving back”, through contributions to selected causes I wanted to support. Initially most of the recipients were well-known NGOs. Most of the times, the organisation remained faceless and my contributions were probably too small for me to know the impact!
I decided that I would be happier to contribute to organizations run by people I know and trust. I felt that in such organizations I could learn how they would utilize my contributions (small or large), and how I could help further. QMed presented me such an opportunity in the last several years, and I have been very happy to be their supporter.
When Vasumathi reached out to me about QMed, what impressed me was her deep understanding and solving an interesting problem. The time and effort required in understanding, accessing and utilizing various information resources in Health Care, for Research and Practice. Her solutions are solidly grounded on her knowledge and experience in the field of Library & Information Sciences. With her team, she is on the road to share their skill building training across India. I am impressed with her deep passion for implementing her ideas to make a difference in the field.
Add to these, the fact that, having known her for several decades, she enjoyed my full trust, and my decision to be a regular donor, was easy.
I wish Vasu and her QMed team many successes as they try to implement new ideas and grow in size and stature.
Thank you Vishy from all of us at QMed! Our best wishes to you and your family.
Our current appeal
In August, we had put out an appeal to help fund the purchase of a laptop for our Technology Head – Ms Fatima. We had estimated a cost of Rs 60,000/- Three donors sent us a total of Rs 35000/- so far
We could not wait longer and have ordered a laptop, choosing to pay in 12 instalments. The total cost works out to Rs 68,344/- and we are happy that it will be delivered tomorrow. We have great hopes that we will get the balance amount of Rs 33344/- from further donations. Whoever chooses to give for this cause, please do leave a note when you give your donation, or just send us an email letting us know that your donation is towards the cost of the laptop.
Oct 22, 2022: Program story – Enhancing QMedCourses to deliver more value
In the last two years, our ELearning courses have elicited great feedback. Occasionally our participants have given suggestions for enhancing one or more aspects and we have made quite a few changes based on these. In fact, we have given “badges of appreciation” to those whose ideas we used.
We also had been noting down our own ideas on how we could enhance the courses. One important idea was to add lots more questions to the Final Assessment Quiz of each course. By doing this, we could allow participants to attempt an assessment as many times as they wished to. As they attempted again the probability of getting new questions to answer would be high. By answering different questions, their learning would better and better.
We are happy to share that we have finally compiled all these and are all set to incorporate them in the site in the coming few days. We are waiting to get feedback about them from participants. The good part is that for those participants who want certificates with high scores, they can keep trying until they get the best scores. Moreover, for us, what is great is now – we can plan to add more and more questions with time, to enhance the learning experience further.
We recently had two webinars that got us great feedback. The first was one where I spoke to Palliative Care practitioners. They were delighted to learn about the Mendeley software for managing references. One of them said “This is the first time I learnt how exactly I should use this tool”. The other was a webinar, which we ourselves conducted for our ELearning participants. We had five people who attended and all of them fervently thanked us for all that we did for them.
An update about our fundraising for a laptop for our Technology Head Ms Fatima. Last time we mentioned that one donor gave Rs 15000/-. On seeing that update two more friends contributed Rs 15,000/- and Rs 5000/ -each. We thank them all.