A family celebrates the birth of a child and it often appears that in no time the child grows up. That is the feeling we got this month when we completed 15 years of QMed’s registration.
We had a simple celebration in office, with a reaffirmation and commitment towards our mission.
What have we achieved in the last 15 years? Delivered around 520 lectures, conducted 245 workshops, launched our ELearning platform in which we registered more than 5000 participants and overall reached out to more than 35000 health sciences students & professionals.
We have had excellent feedback from majority who completed our courses – stressing that these courses must be in the curriculum.
While we have done lots, our eyes are constantly on the denominator, which is massive. We still have to reach out to this denominator – consisting of every health science student and professional – with our skills and knowledge.
We wonder – with all our efforts and with the excellent feedback, why our offerings are not being utilized quickly. We did some intense brainstorming on various aspects and it seems to boil down to one point.
“They don’t know what they don’t know”. Right from decision makers in the health sciences education, to policy makers, they are unaware that there IS a structured method of searching the online literature and a right methodology to reference correctly. Not knowing this, they do not prioritize the need to teach these skills.
We continuously think of what more we can do to solve this problem.
We explored collaborations to reach out to all educational institutions, and started a “top down approach” by meeting Vice Chancellors, Secretaries of the Govt and more. We have told them about our desire to make a positive change. We shared that we offer our knowledge and skills so that students and professionals save lots of time, carry out better research and ensure a return on the investment their institutions make, in online information resources.
Internally we are constantly working at strengthening our offerings:
- Create more courses
- Update the existing ones as the platforms evolve (PubMed & Mendeley)
- Explore how we can use technologies to enhance the courses
As I write this update, we have just completed one significantly MAJOR change in our courses. We have added lots more test questions for the final assessment of each course. Now participants can attempt the assessment as many times as they wish to. Every time, they will attempt a mix of new and old questions as they generate randomly. With different questions each time, they can improve their skills with more testing. With these unlimited attempts, they can download a “best score” certificate!
We have “miles to go before we sleep” – to ensure that this learning becomes part of the health sciences curricula. We invite you to share ideas, inputs, donate / help us raise funds until our work sustains itself!