🧪 Easiest Clinical Research for Students - the Clinical Audit
Hey friends,
This week I've been thinking of potential research I could conduct whilst on my general surgery placement. Hopefully something that might result in either publication or presentation at a local meeting.
The most common research projects students carry out are case reports, literature reviews, and letters/essays. Whilst there's nothing wrong with these, I wanted something a little more hands on.
Clinical research is typically out of reach for most medical students, especially IMGs, requiring a team of physicians, ethicists, and statisticians. But what if I told you there was a way you could do clinical research in the hospital, completely on your own? Thats where clinical audits come in.
The idea of a clinical audit or quality improvement project (QIP) is to measure an outcome e.g. wait times in the ER, introduce an intervention, and re-measure those outcomes in a few months. Check the link below for a short explanation of what an audit is and how to go about it.
Here are a few ideas that you can use for your own projects if you're interested. You'll have to be creative on your intervention though 😉
- Wait times for patients in the ER.
- Time from patient presentation in ER to pelvic fracture repair (could be any surgery where time is important to prognosis).
- Adequate completion of surgical consent forms.
- Complication rates of appendectomies.
Obviously pick something you think you could actually change with an intervention, and re-audit the outcome in 2-3 months to see if anything has changed.
Should I make a more in-depth video on how I'm conducting my audit? Hit <reply> and let me know.
- Chris
📚 My Favourite Resources
🌐 IMG Resource - NIH Clinical Research Course This is a FREE year long online course ran by the NIH in the USA. I was part of the 2021-2022 cohort and I can strongly recommend you sign up. I feel much better prepared to run my own projects after attending, and at the end you get a certificate of participation for your portfolio 😊
💌 App - Self Control Following last week's theme of blocking distractions - the mac app self control has been game changing for me. All it does is let you block access to websites for a specified period of time. Killer feature here is once you active the blocker, it is impossible to reverse, even if you restart your computer 🤯
✍️ Quote of the Week
It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
From Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. Resurfaced using Readwise.