Cochrane South Asia Workshop on Evidence-Based Medicine, MEDICON 2016, 13-16 July 2016
Monday, 15 Aug 2016
Workshop on Evidence-Based Medicine
Cochrane South Asia at MEDICON-2016
10th International Undergraduate Medical Students’ Research Conference 13-16 July 2016
Era’s Lucknow Medical College, Lucknow, India
Cochrane South Asia conducted a workshop on Evidence-Based Medicine for undergraduate medical students at the 10th International Undergraduate Medical Students’ Research Conference, MEDICON 2016, at Lucknow, India.
Lucknow is the historic capital city of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is the most populous in the country. Era’s Lucknow Medical College, one of the privately run medical schools in the city, hosted the 10th edition of the research conference MEDICON, which is supported by the Indian Forum for Medical Students’ Research, INFORMER. Over 300 students from medical colleges in India and a few other countries participated. As part of the conference, various parallel workshops were organized.
Cochrane South Asia Workshop
Encouraging quality research skills in young student researchers is key towards capacity building in health research. Cochrane South Asia has been regularly supporting this cause during the previous editions of this conference as well.
As part of MEDICON 2016, resource persons from Cochrane South Asia, Richard Kirubakaran and Anand Viswanathan, conducted a workshop on ‘Evidence Based Medicine’ for the student delegates.
Participants
30 medical students, equal number of men and women, attended the workshop. The participants were from the following institutions- Era’s Lucknow Medical College, Lucknow; Uttar Pradesh University of Medical Sciences, Saifai; Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Wardha; Guntur Medical College, Guntur; Hind Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow; Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Belagavi; All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubhaneswar; Katihar Medical College, Katihar; DY Patil Medical College, Kolhapur; and Rohilkhand Medical College, Bareilly. Many of the participants had already had basic research experience as awardees of student fellowships from Indian Council of Medical Research.
Workshop Sessions
The programme began with an introductory session on the need for evidence-based healthcare. Subsequent sessions dealt with search strategies, using appropriate study designs in health research, the role of systematic reviews and meta-analysis, and the critical step of contextualizing research evidence and its application in regular clinical practice. The participants were also engaged in a hands-on exercise on designing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the efficacy of a routinely used medication for a common clinical condition.
Feedback
At the end of the workshop, the participants interacted with the resource persons. Many of them were glad that the knowledge gained in the workshop could be very useful in their future research endeavours.
Report prepared by Anand Viswanathan, Cochrane South Asia