Friday, June 15, 2012

Week 5: Emergency Department Shadowing and Subject Testing

This week began on Monday in a meeting with a biostatistics professor who is doing the statistical analysis on the airway study I am helping with. The first objective of this study is to determine a scale to accurately measure a person's ability to do a rapid-sequence intubation outside of the hospital. There is currently no scale for this, and current research debates whether or not prehospital endotrachael intubation should be done by EMTs at all. Developing a scale to determine whether or not EMTs can successfully intubate a patient without doing more harm than good will be important to answer whether nor not EMTs should be intubating patients.

Developing this scale, however, is going to be a lot more difficult than I expected. We need to look at variable strength and assessment tool strength. For example, should a question be a simple YES or NO answer, or should it be a proficiency scale. If we choose a scale, should that scale range from 0 to 5 points, 0 to 10 points, -5 to +5 points, etc. Should certain variables be weighted more than others? The power analysis of each question goes beyond my statistics education. Thankfully that's why Dr. Yang is involved.

On Tuesday I spent the day in the Emergency Department observing and screening for patients who could be eligible for the national emergency medicine studies in which Penn State Hershey is participating. While none of the admitted patients qualified from my 7-3 shift, I did see several interesting trauma cases. I couldn't help but make MCAT questions in my head about the cases I was seeing.... "If drug A increases a patient's blood pressure, which hormone is most likely released and from what gland?"

I finally met with Human Resources yesterday, so hopefully I'll get my first paycheck soon. I'm learning that there are definite advantages of being part of such a large institution, but everything takes so much longer to accomplish...

This afternoon the other research students and I have a meeting with Dr. Terndrup to present our progress. Hopefully he is impressed with what we have accomplished so far. As of today I am half done with my internship. The time is flying!

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