Week 2: Biostatistics and a bomb simulation

My week began with a meeting with Dr. Terndrup. We decided to modify our design to make our project a crossover study. This will allow us to not only gather the longitudinal data we need to determine of the method of teaching CPR is effective after a year, but also to verify the results of the Glick et al study done last year. Dr. Terndrup recommended we meet with the biostats department to make sure our design would yield statistically significant results with our sample size. We met with the same statistician who worked on the Glick et al study last summer, and he liked our idea to use the crossover design. He was very helpful, and I am glad we get 4 free hours of biostats consults! 

On Wednesday, Dr. Kass, an emergency room physician, gave us an applied biostats lecture. It was very helpful and explained a lot of complicated statistical terms in ways that we could apply them to our projects. We had another biostats talk on Thursday by the biostats department which began with this youtube video, which was pretty comical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbODigCZqL8

Because we made changes to our study design, we had to resubmit our project to the Institutional Review Board. Hopefully we will be approved for an exemption early next week.  Because there is 'less than minimal risk' to study participants, we should be exempt from IRB review. 

On Friday I met two med students, a paramedic and a nurse who work for Life Lion, and Nancy who is the nurse who supervises Emergency Department research, at 5:30 AM to go to State College for the day. We used the Lion Reach trailer, which is a 1.5 million dollar trailer which can be a 15 bed mobile hospital or used for educational purposes. We took part in a bomb simulation to see if the emergency personnel in State College were prepared if a bomb were to go off in Beaver Stadium. The simulation was interactive and really put each participant in difficult situations. We had to make decisions to save the most number of lives.

During the afternoon, Dr. Terndrup gave a presentation on septic shock to a group from 

Mount Nittany Medical Center who are developing protocol for treatment of septic shock. The Life Lion paramedic and nurse then gave a presentation a stoke patient they cared for a few months back. Although it was a 12 hour day, it was very enjoyable.