Week 3: Scheduling

The medical student who I am working with got married last Friday, so he spent the week at the beach with his wife. My main goal was to schedule times with the Simulation Lab to test our study participants. Once I finally was able to arrange a meeting to schedule, the women in the Sim Lab were very helpful. I scheduled various dates during June, and they helped me pick times that would be convenient for the residents, EMTS and nurses so they could come right when their shifts ended. I then created a google spreadsheet and emailed all participants so they could sign up for a time that works for them. Unfortunately, only two people have signed up so far. It looks like my task for next week will be trying to convince more people to participate.

On Tuesday, the medical students and I all had to present our projects and progress to Dr. Terndrup. He is the chair of the Emergency Department and the JC alum who offered the internship. Only about half of the group got to present, so I will be presenting sometime next week.

We had a meeting at the Life Lion hanger on Wednesday. Life Lion is Penn State Hershey's helicopter emergency transport service. We learned about how Life Lion operates and the history of the program. They are expecting a new helicopter in the next few weeks which they are very excited about. I was surprised that their helicopters can be flown with GPS coordinates, much like commercial airplanes. They are the only service that serves Central PA that offers this service. This is helpful in bad weather conditions and allows Life Lion to fly in any kind of weather except for thunder storms and ice.

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. 

Week 1

I began my summer research internship with the Emergency Department at Penn State Hershey Medical Center on Monday, May 14th. I am one of 12 students taking part in the Emergency Department Summer Research Program, but I am the only undergraduate student. Everybody else is a medical student. 

After some introductory meetings during the first few days, I have been assigned to work with a first year medical student on a longitudinal study assessing a new technique of teaching CPR. This technique was developed last year by medical students in the same research program I am in, and their study showed impressive immediate results. The long term benefits, however, are unknown. That's where my project comes in. 

The medical student I am working with, Peter, and I are very efficient with our work. We had our research proposal submitted or Institutional Review Board approval by Wednesday and still haven't heard back about it yet. In the meantime, I have done a lit search on longitudinal chest compression studies and have learned a lot about REDCap, a research database that we will be using for the study. 

Peter and I have taken on an additional project too. We will be developing the REDCap database for a three year airway study being done by the Emergency Department. This study will develop a new training method using two-way audio visual communication between an airway expert (emergency room physician or anesthesiologist) and the person being trained. Individual training videos of the intubation will also be created for further training purposes. 

I'm very happy with my internship, and I've only had seven days of work so far. I'm very appreciative of this experience, and am thankful for Dr. Thomas Terndrup, the chair of the Emergency Department at Penn State Hershey and a 1977 Juniata graduate, for allowing me to have this experience.