Medical experts will be able to share skills

Soon, experts working in medical colleges will be able to share their surgical and interventional skills with one another, with the ministry of health proposing to set up telemedicine infrastructure in all medical colleges and institutions to network each other under a new scheme — “e-health, including telemedicine”.

The Central-sponsored scheme of `103.99 crore for the establishment of a National Medical College Network (NMCN) will have about 41 government medical colleges networked in the first phase. Under Phase I of the scheme, a national-cum-regional resource centre, five regional resource centres and 35 other medical colleges shall be networked. To start with, national resource centres will be started at SGPGI, Lucknow, JIPMER, Puducherry, PGIMER, Chandigarh, KEM Medical College & Hospital, Mumbai, AIIMS, and NEIGRIHMS, Shillong, Meghalaya.

The proposal is that the ministry of health will run it for the initial five years, after which the states will take over the management. 

The idea is to facilitate tele-education, access to specialist consultation and access to electronic knowledge repositories. 

The scheme also proposes creating a digital library infrastructure for facilitating medical researchers and knowledge seekers to have continuing education programme. 

Officials say that the infrastructure would facilitate continued professional skill development of human resources for health. “This will help in exchanging the expertise and getting to know the best,” said a senior official. 

The proposed national network of medical colleges will have a central hub housing the data centre which will be designated as the National Resource Centre (NRC). 

The NRC will be networked with five regional hubs to be called as regional resource centres (RRCs) located at different regions of the country.

Source | http://www.asianage.com/india/medical-experts-will-be-able-share-skills-819

Apps for learning English

With gadgets as the new-age teachers, smart services help you learn English quicker The English language doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. However, new-age learning methods are changing that, very quickly. And the smartphone is playing a very important role.  Hello English app, which was updated on  8 July, has been developed by the Jaipur-based start-up Culture Alley. Thedevelopers claim the app has 3 million users. According to app analytics website App Annie, Hello English is the 98th most downloaded app in India on Android phones as of 8 July—and is the most popular among educational apps.  It is currently available as a free download on the Google Play store, and it doesn’t cost a dime as you progress through the different levels of learning—there are pop-up ads within the app, and that is how the developers earn money.  The app can teach translation from almost any Indian language to English—at the time of writing this, the options included Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam and Kannada. The idea is to allow users to link back to their primary dialect to gain a better understanding of the new language. Once you start learning, there are a total of 200 preset lessons that focus on grammar and conversational English—each answer to a question is immediately checked and suggestions offered to the user. In-app virtual currency is accumulated on the successful completion of each lesson—this allows the user to unlock the next, more advanced lesson. The most interesting part is the availability of a tutor over a Whats App-like chat feature—if you have any queries, you can discuss them then and there. More lessons and dictionary additions will happen with future app updates that will be downloadable from the Play store itself. And it is not just the smartphone which is changing the way we learn a new language. The good old computer and the idiot box are also learning avenues.  

Source| http://www.livemint.com