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!
Mar 28, 2023: March updates
Date: Tuesday March 28, 2023
Category: General Update
Keywords: Institutional Subscription, QMedCourses
March has been a great month in some ways and tough in other ways. Great because we had one new institution joining us for our ELearning courses, and two renewing access for the same. The new institution to take up our courses is the Dr DY Patil Medical College from the city of Pune. The two to renew are Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College, Puducherry and the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi. We are already in conversation with them to see how we can work together to encourage maximum learning from our courses. More importantly we are stressing this year that they must throw the courses open to the undergrad medical students, as we are really convinced that this is the best stage for a student to learn these skills.
March has also been tough as several family members and I, fell ill. I had to stay away from work for most of the month. I am glad that we mastered a lot of “work from home” methods and processes during the pandemic and so I could at least execute any urgent and important functions.
I have to specifically thank my colleagues for all their support and taking on more responsibilities from me during this month. They have done a great job. I am also happy to share that this month we have had Priyanka join us at QMed. Priyanka will be taking care of a lot of digital promotion work – something much needed to get everyone in the country to learn more about our courses and enrol.
This month’s update is short and I hope to give you better stories and news next month from QMed.
Wishing you the best and thank you for being there for us!
Feb 23, 2023: Foundation story – Origins of QMed Foundation – “The CD Story”
Date: Thursday February 23, 2023
Category: Organisation Founding Story
Keywords: CD, General Medicine CD, Organization story
People often ask me what made me start QMed. The answer is – several things, but a big trigger was the QMed’s “General Medicine CD”
What was this CD about? When QMed was first only a private limited company, one of the activities we often did was to carry out PubMed searches for students, and doctors who asked for them. Every topic was different and obviously, the search steps were different.
Rajeev Surana, who used to work with us then kept saying “You should not have to re-do searches every time. Every effort needs to be re-usable”. My standard response used to be – “When every individual’s search request is for a different topic, how could we not re-do them?”
And yet, we deliberated upon this thought. And came up with a great idea. Why don’t we start a project where we list several topics and build in a ready PubMed search for each of them? Once people understand this, we could create more projects with more topics, and even make customized ones for those who need them.
We decided to choose 20 general diseases and conditions like Asthma, Diabetes, Hypertension and more. For each topic, we planned 10 subtopics like causes, diagnosis, treatment etc. For every subtopic, we planned three links. Links to
a) Not free (articles with evidence)
b) Free articles
c) Articles available in common journals
Here is a sample
Glaucoma-complications
a) Not free
We thus had 500+ hyperlinks to “pre-done” PubMed searches. When one clicked a link, it would open PubMed, run a search on a topic and fetch just a reasonable number of results (around 30-50 in most cases) – real time. We had built the query so that only the latest and most relevant results showed up.
We launched this product – on a CD then – as we did not want people to remember another password. This was in 2004. People were not yet comfortable with remembering too many passwords. The CD also had a PubMed tutorial – both – in a digital format as well as a print booklet. We had priced the CD at a reasonable Rs 350/-
We expected large sales. We sold just a few.
But there was a key incident which was a major contributor to our decision to start a not for profit trust. A doctor heard about our CD and called us for details. My colleague explained it all clearly. The content in the CD was a PubMed tutorial. Many topics were available as “Internet links”. He would have to run the CD with an internet connection on. Every time he clicked a topic, it would run a real time search and fetch him the latest updates. He heard it all.
After getting the CD he called us and said
“This is only PubMed which is free and you are charging me for it. I don’t want it”.
After all our explaining, he had not understood anything about our offering.
This incident made us feel strongly about the need to create a not for profit arm. We felt it was high time we started teaching what PubMed actually was and what capabilities it has for structured searching.
Only after students and professionals had the necessary literacy would they be able to appreciate something like this.
It took us another three years to register and formalize QMed Knowledge Foundation – in end December 2007. Between then and now – 2023, which is about 15 years, we have conducted nearly 250 workshops and delivered more than 500 lectures. The need is still strong! We need to reach a large denominator.
Feb 9, 2023: Founder story – Presenting the need for a curriculum change: Invited to speak to a group of doctors
Date: Thursday February 9, 2023
Category: Founder Story
Keywords: Lecture, Literature searching, Marvelous Medicine Series, QMedCourses
When in school, I wanted to study Medicine. I could not pursue this field, for a number of personal reasons. My family humorously mentions that I got into Medicine “through the back door”. That is true – my life has just evolved in this profession.
To the extent that I recently had an opportunity to speak about introducing a change in the curriculum.
A friend of mine – Dr Ravi Shankar, is an alumnus from my school. We have been in touch over years. He recently happened to read one of my LinkedIn posts highlighting an interesting article about ethics in authorship. He asked me if I would speak at the “Marvelous Medicine Series”.
He went on to tell me more about the lecture series. It was an initiative that was started by alumni from JIPMER, Puducherry (he is an alumnus from that college), during the Pandemic. The series became so popular that it has continued later on too. Every Wednesday they have a talk by someone on a core medical topic or on something useful for the health professions.
I was delighted to learn about this and accepted the invitation. Dr Ravi introduced me to Dr Vidya who coordinated the show. The three of us had a quick discussion and they were happy to accept my topic:
Literature Searching Skills: An Urgent Need in the Curriculum
This event was an opportunity to appeal to a large number of doctors – and get them interested in our Mission. I had to make sure that I had the best of content and that I should definitely finish it in the allotted time, keeping people well engaged. I took a good two days to prepare for it – right from preparing a mind-map plan, to revising the slides a number of times and rehearsing the timings.
I shared with the audience – some of the observations I had made in the profession. About many students and professionals losing precious time. They did not have the exposure to the skills of structured searching and referencing. From residents struggling with their theses – to doctors battling with correct referencing – to those who needed advanced help with their systematic review searches.
I gave them a glimpse of what these skills were and how they made a difference. Both in terms of time (national hours) saved, and about the better basis for research. I talked about QMed’s work. I told them why we felt that it was important to learn these skills right from the UG stage and not later. Finally, I asked them to connect with me to share their inputs – telling them that it was vital that we collaborated and approached the commissions and councils together.
I finished my presentation in the allotted 40-45 minutes and then enjoyed the discussions that followed. It was wonderful that senior faculty and practitioners appreciated the talk and agreed with this need. The chat window was flooded with comments about the need to include these skills in the UG stage. We also had related discussions – deliberated about the possibility of AI taking over in future. (Yes – we need to be open to that!). T
I now await the recording of the session, so that we could share it with a larger audience and get more people involved in our quest – getting the National Medical Commission to implement our teaching in all medical colleges. After all, they have mentioned in their Foundation Course document (page 64):
Students should be introduced to the basic use of word and power point, familiar with search engines, in performing a literature search and accessing online resources.
Jan 23, 2023: Program story – Sikkim Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences – a Model Institution
The Sikkim Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences (SMIMS) located in Gangtok is, for QMed a dream institution!
They were amongst the first institutions, which subscribed to our ELearning courses, when we had them hosted with Mediknit. At that time, they were the only institution that ensured that majority completed all courses. At the end of one year, they took a break. Later when we launched our courses on www.qmedcourses.in, they came back to us for two whole years.
Some of the feedback we received by participants of the program:
- I highly appreciate the initiative as this would largely enable researchers to utilize their time efficiently
- This course has provided me with the information on some minute details of research and the searching process
- I learned the skill of teaching along with learning PubMed!
- I liked how the questionnaire had different attempts so that we can go back and find the answer
- The most interesting part is the distribution of timing for each subtopic
- I have been using PubMed for about 5 years and I have now learnt many features from this course that I never knew before.
Why do we call SMIMS a Dream Institution? Two of their Professors who were the main coordinators made the effort to ensure that the institution made full usage of the learning opportunities we offered. When we asked them what all they did to ensure full usage, they responded:
- They made a single point of contact in every department. This person was responsible to motivate people in the department to register and complete the course.
- They sent reminders for completion to: The specific person in every department; Next – individually to all participants; Third – asked QMed to send to all
- They made it mandatory to submit the certificates for various purposes
We at QMed now want to share these methods with all colleges, showing SMIMS as a role model.
That is a great story, but….
The other side is that SMIMS, after two years of subscription have not decided to renew their access. We are waiting to discuss it further, but it brings us back to our regular challenge – “Why do institutions not consider this learning to be a must for every new batch of students and all new faculty? We are waiting to find out more from SMIMS. Once we learn, we will have to figure out more answers and rework our communications.
Till then:
We ARE very grateful to SMIMS for having been a model institution and for sharing their methodology with us.
We still hope they will change their minds and renew their access once more; this time ensuring that the undergrad medical students will also be made to do the courses.
We continue to be in the quest of finding the best way to ensure every institution’s acceptance of the reality:
“Literature Searching & Referencing are skills that need to be taught in a structured manner and must be made compulsory in the curriculum”.