This summer I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jessica Simon, Dr. Aynharan Sinnarajah, and several other people from the Palliative Care Early and Systematic (PaCES) team. The PaCES project is multi-faceted, but the overarching theme is improving the quality of advance care planning (ACP) in Alberta, particularly as it relates to palliative care. My project for the summer was focused on analyzing a short questionnaire known as the My Conversations survey. The My Conversations survey was designed to understand advanced colorectal cancer patients’ month-to-month satisfaction regarding ACP conversations they had with their clinicians if they had any. By the time I joined the study, the data collection stage was just wrapping up, so I worked on sorting out the data for my first two months (May and June). Once the more tedious organizing stage was completed, I began to analyze the data for interesting trends. In short, I found most patients were satisfied with their conversations, but there were certain ACP elements being discussed far more frequently than others, even though they’re all equally important when it comes to developing comprehensive goals-of-care orders. I also set up and conducted several statistical tests to determine whether a significant difference existed between Calgary patients’ responses to the survey and Edmonton patients’ responses to the survey, but nothing of significance was found. However, Dr. Simon and Dr. Sinnarajah were still quite pleased with my overall findings and offered me the opportunity to help them prepare a manuscript based on the My Conversations survey.
For the last two months of my studentship (July and August), I worked on writing the manuscript. Additionally, Dr. Simon offered me the opportunity to create a poster based on my summer’s work, which I gladly accepted. In creating the poster, the goal was to present it at a major conference in Toronto next spring, which would bring lots of attention to the research PaCES had been conducting over the past several years.
Overall, my summer research work was very fun! I joined the PaCES project knowing hardly anything about ACP or palliative care protocol in general, but in four short months, I was able to learn so much. The experience I gained working on a manuscript and preparing a poster was certainly valuable, however, what I really enjoyed about my summer research experience was knowing my work would make a real-world difference. It was quite rewarding knowing the findings from my research would be used to inform clinicians’ practice and further improve the quality of care patients in palliative care receive.
- Said Hussein
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