KEMU Mentoring Program

Friday 28 November 2014

Facilitator's Guide for Session II-How to choose Mentor and find an Elective?

Second Session: How to choose mentor and find an elective?
Date: June 14th 2014
Format: Lecture via Google Plus
Faculty: Basmaa Ali MD
Length: 90 Minutes
Objectives

To help students in choosing a mentor.
To guide them to find electives for themselves.

Pre-Session Work:

Meeting to discuss MBTI within teams and choose specialty for each student
Meeting to choose possible Mentors
Students submitted their CVs to the Group leaders CVs. A sample of CV was provided by faculty and everyone was asked to follow the pattern.

The session was divided into three parts:

How to choose mentors?
How to find electives?
QA session

How to choose mentors?

This part of the session consisted of:
I.Definition of a Mentor and qualities of a good Mentor:
"A mentor was defined to be a person who teaches or gives advice to a less experienced person often a younger one." A mentor teaches , supports, councils, sponsers and if necessary provides protection to its mentee.
A good mentor should have following qualities:

Integrity
Trustworthy
influential
Available
similar ethics and values
Good communicator
Openness
Fun

It is better to have a committee of mentors consisting of:

Process mentor
Content mentor
Project mentor
Elective mentor

II.Finding the right Mentor
Students were asked to
Actively seek mentors
Look for the past performance of the mentor, as it is the best index for the future performance.
This part went well but many students still had questions about choosing mentors as most of the faculty in their surrounding had no online record of their recent research work
Note: A list of Process, Project, Content and Elective Mentors for the students in the programme was provided. Note: The powerpoint slides containing the details of faculty members selected as mentors has been uploaded to kemumentoring.blogspot.com
III.How to approach a Mentor?
Students were given a detailed briefing on how to approach a mentor. Each student was asked to write a cover letter. A cover letter must contain
The detail of mentor's most recent research work
How you (mentee) can help him in his research
Ask the mentor to schedule a meeting ASAP
Attach your CV and send it to mentor by mail or give him by hand.
This part went quite well as students got every detail they needed to know about approaching the mentor.

How to find an Elective?

This part of session was aimed at guiding the students about how to put their efforts in the right place. It consisted of following points:

I.Why do an Elective?

An elective can help in students learning more about
Other skills
Different specialities
Other mentors
Different settings
Geography they want to work in

II.What to learn in an elective?

An Elective is aimed at learning following things

How to increase patient outcome?
How to decrease risk for yourself/
Business of medicine
Ethics of medicine

III.How to choose an elective?

Before applying for electives one must know following things:

Which speciality does he want to work in?
How to choose a mentor?
In what kind of settings he wants to work in?
Geography of the place he is going to work.

This part was good but due to shortage of time, things could not be explained well. Students wanted to know more about how to apply for electives? and what sort of electives can help them in pursuing a specific career.
Question Answer Session:
QA session could not happen due to shortage of time and students were asked to mail their questions to the faculty if they have any.
Session could not get started at the given time so Elective part and QA part was not satisfactory.
Every student was asked to fill the feedback form about the session and write cover letters and submit them to faculty within one week.
Overall this was a good session except the sound quality and time management needed to be improved. Composite feedback by all the students has been uploaded to the blog.

Facilitator's Guide Session III- How to Do Clinical Research At KEMU?

Second Session: How to do clinical research at KEMU?
Date: June 21st 2014
Format: Lecture via Google Plus
Faculty: Dr. Ahmad M Rashid MD,FCCP
Length: 90 Minutes
Objective:
The session was basically aimed at
helping the students formulate their own clinical questions.
Give basic information of clinical research structure.
Pre-session work:
Students were directed to study the document about clinical research provided by Dr. Mujtaba Rashid. Here is a link to that stuff:
http://kemumentoring.blogspot.com/2014/06/clinical-research-reading-before-session.html

The session was divided into following segments:

Introduction of clinical research with brief history
Basic structure of research
How to develop clinical question
Clinical hypothesis
Research methods
Research model
QA session

1.Introduction of clinical trials:
      Describing the history of clinical trials, Dr. Rashid told that James Lind, a Scottish physician is attributed to have conducted first ever known clinical trials. British trading ships and Navy were suffering from Scurvy. It was known that citrus fruit might help cure scurvy. James Lind conducted clinical trials to prove this hypothesis. The study design of his trials
He divided 12 scorbutic sailors into six groups of two. They all received the same diet but, in addition:
Group 1: was given a quart of cider daily
Group 2: twenty-five drops of elixir of vitriol (sulfuric acid),
Group 3: six spoonful of vinegar
Group 4: half a pint of seawater
Group 5: received two oranges and one lemon
Group 6: a spicy paste plus a drink of barley water
The treatment of group five stopped after six days when they ran out of fruit, but by that time one sailor was fit for duty while the other had almost recovered. Apart from that, only group one also showed some effect of its treatment.
The entire session was based on this first clinical trial. All the salient features of research were explained by dr. Rashid using Lind's trial .
2.Basic Structure of Clinical Research:
      Clinical research has following building blocks:
Clinical/Research Question
Hypothesis
Methods
Observations
Results-Statistics Conclusions
3.What is a clinical question and how to develop an answerable clinical question:
        A researchable question is an uncertainty about a problem that can be challenged, examined and analyzed to provide useful information. In case of first ever clinical trial mentioned above, the clinical question was

“Can Scurvy be treated by addition of citrus fruit to the diet of sailors?”
PICO model is used to develop a clinical question. PICO stands for:
P: Population of interest :Patient or the
problem to be addressed
I: Intervention: Exposure to be considered–
treatments/ tests
C: Control :Control or comparison intervention treatment/placebo/standard of
care
O: Outcome :Outcome of interest
To formulate a research question on must perform:
Background research
Literature review
Dissect the questions into parts
Other relevant questions
4.Clinical Hypothesis:
             Clinical hypotheses are theories that could explain presenting behavior or facts. Their purpose is to guide current assessment and intervention. In case of Lind's trial the hypothesis would be
“Citrus fruit will stop “putrefaction” of sailors’ bodies hence preventing Scurvy.”
A good hypothesis should meet following criteria:
A hypothesis should concern information that still needs to be established.
A hypothesis should be a statement worded precisely and objectively in the present tense
A hypothesis can relate to a range of factors: nature of impairment, severity of impairment, impact of impairment etc.
A hypothesis should be based on clear evidence (reported or theoretical) which provides a rationale for formulating it.
A hypothesis should be specific enough to lead towards clear assessment and intervention objectives.

5.Research Methods:
Research studies can be Experimental or Observational
Experimental Studies:
    Experimental studies have following features:
allocation or assignment of individuals is under control of investigator and thus can be randomized.
investigator controls the assignment of the exposure or of the
treatment
symmetry of potential unknown confounders is maintained through randomization
Observational Studies:
       Observational studies have following features:
Allocation or assignment of factors is not under control of investigator
The combinations are self-selected or are "experiments of nature“
For those questions where it would be unethical to assign factors,
Investigators are limited to observational studies
6.Research model:
       Finally a research model was provided by Dr. Rashid to students to have a complete understanding of Research design. Model was based on the following topic:
"Dabigatran versus warfarin in the treatment of Acute venous Thromboembolism
The complete model is given in power point presentation to be uploaded on the blog:
kemumentoring.bogspot.com
7.QA session:
Students were encouraged to ask questions regarding the session. A few asked about their queries but due to shortage of time, the rest were asked to mail their questions. Everyone was provided with an online feedback form to be filled.

Overall this was a good session. Sound Quality was excellent. But the drawback was that a lot of things were tried to be covered in one session so many things remained unexplained. Most students were of the opinion that there should have been a separate session about clinical question as this is the foundation step for the new people in the field of research.

Sunday 27 July 2014

Internal Review Board (IRB) or Synopsis Proforma Form for KEMU

IRB Form KEMU

No research can be published in a reputable journal without having been approved by the IRB of the institution in which the research was done. This is the KEMU IRB form that each team will need to fill and submit by Sept 15th so we can start collecting data. ou can get the document on this link and download from File ---> download.