Blog Week 2: Patient + Staff Participation in Research
April 8, 2024
Throughout week 2, I discovered how diverse studies can be and analyzed the effects. The variousness of studies has a profound impact on patient participation in studies. I seek to understand the variousness of studies to make my study more accurate.
One of the research studies I am currently working on with Maimonides examines emergency department doctors. Our methodology is to watch over emergency department doctors and record what they are working on for two hours. They perform a wide variety of tasks, some for short periods, others for long periods. As a researcher, I follow them around and record their tasks.
This relates to my study because informed consent is required to study the doctors. The doctors are required to sign a document, describing what we will do and that their employment could be at risk. Their employment is only at risk if we see them doing something inappropriate while watching them for two hours (which is unlikely). Still, seeing that sentence where they need to sign stops many doctors from agreeing to the study. On the other hand, some doctors might find being followed for two hours irritating which results in them declining to participate. Both of these causes lead to less staff participation in research.
Another research study I’m assisting Maimonides with relates to acute respiratory infections. Acute respiratory infections obstruct the airway and prevent normal breathing. Keeping in mind the seriousness of the infections, obtaining consent to do research is very difficult. There must be informed consent which requires the patient to understand the entire study and have time to voice questions or concerns. The patient could either be in serious pain, have a procedure being conducted on them, or not comprehend the research study to their fullest ability. All of these prevent informed consent from being obtained.
These two studies have shown how a variety of factors play into less participation in studies. In future blogs, I will find the most pertinent causes that lead to patients and staff avoiding participation in research. Addressing these causes will be key to increasing the efficiency of research.
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I must say this project is quite fascinating. I was wondering if you knew how potential challenges of obtaining informed consent may affect patient and staff participation in research studies.
As we ask many patients to engage in our research, many unfortunately decline. Obtaining informed consent can be tricky in many scenarios, which in turn leads to less patient and staff participation in research studies.
Have you thought about anyways to get around including the line about how what is observed could affect employment status? Are there any incentives for the doctors allowing you to follow them around?
Sadly, I don’t believe there is a get-around for the line about affecting employment status. We, the research team, have to inform the doctor about any potential outcomes of our research. I do agree that incentives would be a great idea. We have incentives for a couple of other patient studies, so adding them into this study would probably increase participation greatly!