Week 10: Wrapping up my Research Paper and Reflection on Medicine as a Career Path

Hi everyone! Welcome to my final blog.

This is so bittersweet, and I’m so sad to see the end of this senior project. The life lessons I’ve learned in the past 10 weeks have further solidified my drive to pursue medicine as a career path. Whether it be almost sleeping through my night shifts, having difficulty in speaking to patients in different languages, learning an introduction on how to read ECGs, or discussing important questions with doctors on how to cope with death and suffering of patients (something I’m worried about in the future), I’ve learned more about what it truly takes to become a doctor. This job requires a large amount of confidence, mental strength, vast amount of knowledge, critical thinking, and constant empathy for patients.

Working in the E.R. is intense, as everywhere you turn there will be children crying, different codes being cast across the intercom speaker to indicate medical emergencies, patients constantly being in pain, and family members in panic. But, for E.R. doctors, it is quite rewarding to be able to send a patient home either having solved or alleviating their medical issue, instead of admitting them to the hospital for further care. 

In terms of my project, in all honesty, I am slightly behind. I was slightly worried about collecting my data, and in the end have ended up with 9 patients as my sample size. In a span of 2 months, I was truly expecting to at least reach 15 patients, but due to multiple factors my expected sample size was not reached. This is due to patients who have psychiatric illnesses who are not in a mental state to answer my survey questions, patients who have different language barriers, or patients who are unwilling to take part in my project.

Overall, I added a few more topics to my research paper such as a case study on the 77-year-old woman I met at the inpatient center, due to her remarkable decrease in A1C levels from the diabetes to prediabetes range.  Additionally, I will be writing about diabetes education policies and the American Diabetes Association’s standards for diabetes education across the US. While my project cannot project a direct cause and effect relationship between diabetes education and health literacy rates, I hope that this project furthers the movement to integrate preventive care in dominantly curative environments, such as in the E.R. I hope my project takes a step in this movement to hire mandatory diabetes educators in the E.R, or mandate E.R. nurses and doctors to be trained in diabetes education and hold 5 minute educational sessions. After all, it only takes 5 minutes to make a change! These patients improved their accuracy levels on comprehension questions from 10 – 20%. If these patients were able to improve their literacy rates by this much in a matter of 1-2 months, think about how much change we could create with an established diabetes education program at E.Rs! 

Thank you for following along on my journey, and hopefully in a few years, you can also call me “Doc”! 

Live, laugh, love, medicine!