Hello, my name is Mariia Melnikova, I´m a medical doctor in Portugal, in my 3rd year of residency in Public Health. Nelson Sousa is also an MD, PhD, in his 4th year of Public Health residency in Portugal.
As a part of our internship program in Public Health, we have a few modules which are mandatory, like “Epidemiology” and “Healthcare management”, and only one optional module, for which we could choose anything - as long as we could explain why we had made that decision and how it would benefit our professional growth. The placement could be anywhere in the world. For example, some of our colleagues chose to do their optional module in Geneva, at the WHO.
We were particularly interested in improving our knowledge of research processes and evidence-based medicine and were looking for organizations which are the best in these fields.
So, we were very happy when Cochrane Croatia accepted our application! We we’re in Split from July till September 2022.
We´d like to express our admiration of Professor Ana Marušić: the pace and the standards of her work are very high, and it was challenging keeping up with her team! She invited us to participate in a project titled “Did the Russian aggression affect clinical trials in Ukraine?” We worked on data extraction and learnt how to statistically analyse this data, which allowed us the opportunity to base our opinion on hard evidence, rather than only on intuition. It was a great experience and a fantastic opportunity to work together with a team of experienced researchers.
We also feel deep gratitude to Prof. Irena Zakarija-Grković! She accompanied us throughout the entire internship, from the very first email and online meetings - up to family dinners and some amazing trips in Dalmatia! It was Irena who organized most of our internship, oversaw all of our projects in Croatia and provided all the necessary support and communication with other investigators and interesting specialists. We did not expect to receive such a warm welcome and so much support from the Director of Cochrane Croatia herself, so our communication was very informal but amazingly effective.
Prof Irena also organized a meeting with the head of the university library, Prof Ana Utrobicic, which was extremely informative! In a few hours she explained a lot of information about literature searching, different sources and databases, with several tricks that explain the importance of search strategy. It was a precious short course that must be recommended for everyone who works with any literature search!
We are also grateful to have been given the opportunity to attend the 14th Croatian Cochrane Symposium, held at the University of Split School of Medicine on the 1st September, and see the importance of quality research for different groups, like patients, not only for medical doctors or investigators.
All of our colleagues in the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (“from the 6th floor”, Križine) were always approachable and gave a lot of valuable recommendations: from options for free statistical software - to choosing the best restaurants on the islands. We would like to thank Ivan Buljan for his time and patience with all our questions, Marija Franka Žuljević – for recommending an interesting topic for further work, and Luka, Nancy and all our colleagues for their sympathy and warm welcome.
It was an unforgettable experience!
We are very grateful to the whole team at Cochrane Croatia and hope to see you in Portugal!
Muito obrigado!
Mariia Melnikova, Nelson Sousa,
Portugal
