JEDDAH, 22 April 2007 — Medical records are an important reference material for doctors, provided they are used correctly. In order to educate hospital staffers on how to use patients’ records, the Ministry of Health opened yesterday a five-day training program to teach research methodologies for consultants from various specialties in different hospitals.
Among the attendees were dermatologists, ob/gyn consultants, surgeons and pediatricians.
Dr. Yasser Al-Ghamdi, general director of Makkah Region Health Affairs, along with Dr. Nasser Al-Hamdan, general supervisor of the Field Epidemiology Training Program at the Ministry of Health, opened the training workshop at King Fahd Hospital Research Center Auditorium.
“This course aims to teach doctors how to use the huge amount of information in patients’ files and transfer it into data that can help them discover new cases and form statistics in order to improve treatment,” said Al-Hamdan.
At the end of the course participants are expected to understand the basic principles underlying health research and develop their skills to plan and conduct small-scale studies.
The five-day course includes lectures and workshops where participants will suggest titles of researches coming from each doctor’s specialty.
“We will discuss the suggestions and come out with proposals so that they can implement the research after the course ends. They must also be able to write articles about health issues in magazines,” he said.
Among the researches discussed in the course are those on diabetes, clinical services, people’s feedback on those services, depression among different ages and the late diagnosis of rheumatoid cases among adults.
Al-Hamdan said that there is an insufficiency in teaching research methodologies at medical colleges. Students have a limited number of lectures and they concentrate more on scientific and clinical courses since their grades mainly depend on those courses. After they graduate and start working, they feel that they lack skills in research.
“More time must be given to teach students those skills. However, regular courses on research methodology are important in order to discus the updates in the field of research,” he said.
