Here students will provide monthly updates on their projects and utilize the page as a resource for feedback, guidance, and direction. You can attach documents, images, post links, or use the discussion text box to provide your update.
Student peers and community partners are encouraged to comment, provide suggestions, and ask questions regarding the updates.
January has been a slower project month for me with the holidays! I’ve continued to chip away at process mapping our Whole Person Health Navigator program and done some research on external organizations that have navigator services for LGBTQ+ patients. I’ve been trying to connect with them to learn more about their programs, so hopefully one will respond soon! Otherwise, trying to navigate partnering with Equitas now that I am back on rotation until basically the end of the school year, so figuring out best ways to communicate when I can’t pop over to clinic in the middle of the day anymore.
January has been slow so far. We are sending out our surveys as planned but unfortunately had to move our clinic back a week due to weather. We have plans to send out the survey to all previous clients over the past 2 years as well. Next, I plan to use literature and other free clinic frameworks to help interpret and incorporate our findings. My guess is that we will use our data up until end of Feb for my final presentation. Aside from these logistical issues, our clinic is seeing more patients than ever and I’m blessed that we can help in small, yet profound ways.
Consent forms are almost done and data collection is underway! Although most of the work will be done in February as I just got back from a month out of the country and in person courses starting again. Looking forward to finishing data collection after the next week of courses are done.
January has been a slower month for me as well. I went to the difficult-to-treat asthma clinic twice this month and recruited one patient to get a home-evaluation. This project has been difficult schedule-wise with in person rotations and that clinic only running once per week. I’m hoping to be able to attend more clinics after this rotation is over in a couple weeks!
Ah! Goodness I apologize for forgetting to get this turned in. January was THE month of my project making progress.
I was finally not doing an away rotation or traveling and was mostly in Cincinnati at this time. At the start of the year, I had planned to do the actual administration of my survey in October, but as the schedule changed and then changed again, I didn’t have the chance to until now. Huge shoutout to CAIN for being flexible and an amazing partner. I had set aside 6 pantry sessions to get my 50 survey responses, and only ended up needing 1.5 of those because people were so amenable to filling it out. I learned that physical copies were the superior option by far. Not a single person scanned my QR code to do it on their own phones, and maybe 1/3 of people used the ipad I brought with me. Most people were able to answer the questions easily on their own, but a handful of people had difficulty with some of the negatives of the questions I had formulated.
The other component of the project was a focus group. The ideal size for a focus group is 6-8 people, in a small and comfortable room where everyone has the chance to talk. Previous focus groups at CAIN have been around 3-4 for the English-speaking group and maybe 1-2 for the Spanish speaking group. To get the numbers up, we decided to advertise the focus group in advance and offer $25 gift cards to anyone who attended. I misplanned this immensely, over 40 people came. Thankfully, my partner has a massive stash of gift cards that they were happy to use for the event, but it was definitely a learning point for the future. To run the focus group, I had to start facilitating, but was unable to lock the door to limit the number of people who came in. It ended up being more of a town-hall style conversation, but we did get a lot of great discussion going.
For the Spanish group, I did my best to introduce the group, ask questions, and choose which questions to ask next. However, I had my amazing partner with me who is a much better Spanish speaker to fill in the gaps. This group was ~12 and had a much more focus-group type discussion, although they were definitely above the standard.
I kind of shared my January update in my December update, my bad! I will say that December and January were big months for my project and the elective in general. I spent a lot of time creating my survey, inputting the survey into Qualtrics, translating the survey into Spanish, creating Spanish and English paper versions of the survey, and surveying people. I also spent a lot of time volunteering at CAIN. I’ve spent some time working outside at CAIN but due to the freezing weather I also spent a lot of time inside calling people next in line and getting them appropriately sized carts to shop.