Please respond to the prompts in the discussion board below:
What are some potential project roadblocks you can forecast and how will you and your partner navigate? For example, your M4 schedule, participant recruitment, data collection, staff availability, etc.
Describe any other progress you may have made on your project in the last month.
I am working with Cincinnati Street Medicine. We got our first batch of medications for the van delivered and set to go out soon. I also submitted the IRB so that we can hopefully begin collecting survey data soon. I think I foresee a potential roadblock there, just making sure that the surveys are actually administered out on the van.
At this point in the year I am a bit worried about meeting all my hours requirements. I have essentially the entire fall off to work on the van, but there are sometimes other learners/guests going out. I just want to makes sure I am meeting hour requirements, especially since I have a very busy winter with rotations. I got some book recommendations from my community site about street medicine/homeless medicine so perhaps if things are slow I can spend some time reading those to expand my understanding?
Overall project going well. Looking forward to starting data collection and volunteering more with the team!
My project involves improving the follow up process for clients after they receive equipment. This includes working on the survey that is already being sent out but has a terrible response rate, calling those who did not respond, and hopefully doing home visits to those who are willing in order to talk to them about their experience and take photos for a searchable database my community partner is hoping to develop. One roadblock I foresee is getting ahold of clients, especially those who received their equipment a while ago. Additionally, I am not an experienced photographer; I will need to do some research on how to take good photos so that they can be used by the organization and don’t look unprofessional.
Over the past month, most of my progress has been waiting on responses from the laboratory manager at UC. I have been working in bits and pieces of the project in advance, like with the IRB and laboratory flowsheets. However, it has been made more difficult and slightly frustrating by lack of proper response. I understand that this is a temporary roadblock and I know I can make further progress without that information quite yet.
On the positive side, I will soon be much more open than before with my schedule, being able to devote much more time to service and my project. I hope to implement my project later this fall and am confident I have some steps to take!
The past month I have continued working on the parameters and inclusion criteria for the retrospective cohort study I will be doing for PWC. I have usually done manual chart reviews, but another collaborator statistician believes that this survey can be automated. I have no experience writing code, so I am figuring out which collaborators can best assist with this. Overall, things will be picking up this fall, which I am looking forward to.
My project direction has taken a bit of a turn in the past month. I am working with Meals on Wheels and had originally been focused on helping develop and implement an updated survey to gain more information about the impact of their organization and to guide future direction. However, this initiative became much larger than the initial department I was working with and it’s unclear how/when they will be proceeding with that development. I am continuing to work with their Social Connections department but will likely be moving in a different direction and focusing more on developing programming they can provide for their clients. I have meetings upcoming to discuss this further and get a clearer idea of what our goals will be.
I have also been met with the challenge of my M4 schedule. Until this point, my schedule has been packed with rotations with long hours making it challenging to meet regularly with my community partner during business hours or to get hands on service with them in. I had some concerns about being able to meet my hours for the course but I am hopeful that with a much lighter fall/winter schedule, I’ll be able to catch up on service hours and dedicate much more time to the organization and our project development.
We had the climate cafe on August 1st which was a minor barrier to progress due to low attendance. Since this was one of the avenues of recruitment for the project, we were worried about recruiting additional participants for the project in a few weeks. In the weeks following, we recruited about 15 participants through the community and word of mouth which was slightly lower than our goal of 20 total participants.
At our first overview session on August 22nd, not all 15 participants showed up. We are working on following up with these patients and gauging their continued interest in the project. The next session is on September 12th. The biggest barrier right now is ensuring continued participation in the project.
I am working with Cradle Cincinnati, and we have just submitted our IRB for our project on examining demographic differences and disparities in sleep-related infant deaths in Hamilton County, Ohio.
August has been rough from the project point of view. I was on an International away rotation in India, and the time zones made it challenging to have fruitful conversations.
Further, the region was impacted by flooding and a shift in our primary hospital’s location. Unfortunately, during these events the community paramedine program was not a high priority, however, it does present as an opportunity to start working on more hospital collaboration and start streamlining the project.
Being back in the country, I am hopeful that I can get the wheels rolling and pick up momentum in the coming months.
In August, I have distributed 24 decoration kits to Cincinnati Hanger clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Neurosurgery clinic. I am pleased with developing contacts with neurosurgery and plastic surgery clinics.
My plans for September:
I have had a meeting with my contact at SRFC to figure out the best way to go about setting up an extra clinic day. The biggest thing to consider is the increased volume of people at the center compared to Saturday mornings. In the next few weeks, I plan to spend time at The Healing Center in person to get a sense of what changes in workflow may be necessary and what type of numbers we’d be working with.
I am working with Footcare for the Souls and right now creating packets for new trainees who would like to do footcare and sending communications to the Nursing school to allow student nurses to help come train/volunteer.
The water collection system is slowly being finished. The water tank is now on the stand next to the downspout. Since the church has old copper gutters covered in lead paint, we are being careful about how we get the water from the gutter to the tank. The next step is to find an appropriate conduit that can safely divert the water from the downspout into the tank without contaminating it.
I am still working out the details for the community garden evaluation project with the primary garden I’m working with and the other gardens in Walnut Hills. The basic idea is to do a needs assessment and determine to what degree the gardens are successful in their mission to provide fresh food to the community given their lack of a local grocery store.