First Anniversary of QMed Knowledge Foundation

QMed Knowledge Foundation held its first anniversary celebrations on the 9th of January 2009, at the Hall of Quest Nehru Centre. We had about 30 invitees who attended the event despite the fuel shortage problem due to the petroleum companies strike.

Our Trustee Dr. Anand Shandilya welcomed the gathering He touched upon QMed's history - with all its activities under the banner of a Private Limited company and its decision to move everything under the umbrella of a Not-for-profit Trust in Dec 2007. The move has made a great difference and many of our target audience have specially remarked about how they feel comfortable dealing with an NPO. He also mentioned that while we have had many achievements, we still need to be financially stable. We have a current operating deficit of Rs. 3 lakhs; this not counting all the initial setting up and planning duration when we hardly had any revenue. He stressed how we have been very careful about keeping expenditure as low as we can. Our CEO Vasumathi Sriganesh gave a report on the year's activities. The highlight was having conducted 17 training programs on "PubMed - Basics", between April and December 2008 where we have trained about 400 health professionals. We have had excellent feedback and participants included a range of participants - from Deans of Medical Colleges to students, senior practitioners to paramedical professionals and of course medical librarians. We created two new websites. We have about 20 individual members for our literature search and document delivery offering, and three institutional members for document delivery. We have done a library computerization project for the Foundation for Medical Research. The CEO's presentation can be viewed here.

Following this, we had a very interesting panel discussion. The panelists included 3 consultants, 1 resident doctor, 2 medical librarians and 1 senior nurse. Three academicians including the Dean of a medical college could not make it due to the problem of the day. Our CEO asked some questions and got opinions or initiated discussions about various aspects of the use of the Internet or libraries for medical information, including awareness of copyright issues, modes of literature search & document access, their expectations from libraries etc. The discussion was very lively and people expressed problems and discussed possible solutions and assured us that they would help us in all our initiatives in working at these.

The program ended with a vote of thanks by Ms. Dipti Suvarna and tea and snacks for the invitees.

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