Week 9: Working on my Research Paper & Reflecting on My Project’s Challenges

Welcome to Week 9! This week I was able to further interact with patients, work on the “Results and Discussion” section of my research paper, and start preparing to work on my research poster.

Translation Difficulties

The week started off with interacting with patients. A certain patient I last spoke with had a communication barrier, as he was a dominant Spanish speaker. With this patient interaction, I learned to be independent and used the translating service that nurses used to communicate with patients who spoke different languages. Even with this translating service, I faced multiple difficulties. While both the patient and I experienced some frustration in the communication barrier, I managed to stay calm in this situation and understand that patients may not all react in the same ways to the information I was communicating with them. While I was able to have the translator translate each survey question and answer into Spanish, the patient expressed his frustration in the confusion over the purpose of my survey. After continuously explaining the purpose of my project and requesting his patience, he hesitantly agreed to answer my survey questions. When I started to educate him with the help of the translator, he fell asleep during my educational session, causing me to be unable to conduct the rest of my project procedure. 

What I learned

With this experience, I learned that it was my responsibility, as someone who grew up learning multiple languages, to make my educational handouts more accessible to everyone. This way if I encountered any difficulties in my educational session with patients, the information I wanted to convey would be accessible through the handouts. This prompted me to translate all my educational handouts to several different languages commonly spoken in the Bay Area: Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Tagalog.

This experience is something I will always remember and will be a motivating factor for me to learn as many languages as I can in the future. I wish to use these languages in the hospital setting, to further connect with patients and help make them comfortable to express any concerns they have.  

Concerns

I was slightly worried over my small sample size. A few patients I surveyed initially, did not respond to the follow up survey I tried conducting over the phone. Due to this, my sample size was smaller than initially speculated in the beginning of my project. With this in mind, I am hoping to steer my project in the direction of a case study and continue emphasizing the correlation between diabetes education and literacy rates. After all, quality over quantity! 

Thank you for reading my blogs, and stay tuned for my last blog next week!