Week 8, Finally in the Field, and Learning the Hard Way

This week marked a significant turning point in my Senior Project: I finally made it into the Emergency Department at Maimonides Medical Center. Getting there, though, required a fair amount of groundwork first.

The week when I reached out to Antonios and his team at Maimonides to nail down the logistics of administering my surveys. We discussed what my actual interactions with patients would look like: how to approach them, what to say, and what the general flow of a session would be. 

On Wednesday, I made a visit to the Emergency Medicine office at Maimonides. I met with the team, asked a few lingering questions, and printed out physical copies of my survey. 

Thursday was the day I’d been looking forward to: my first real session in the ED. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned. Over four hours, I was unable to survey a single patient. Because of my eligibility criteria, I can only approach patients who are waiting to be discharged, meaning they’ve already been seen and cleared by a physician but haven’t yet left. That window of time, I quickly discovered, represents a much smaller fraction of the patient population than I had originally anticipated. The ED is a busy, unpredictable environment, and most patients are somewhere in the middle of their care, not at the end of it.

Friday went considerably better. I returned and managed to collect five responses. It wasn’t a large haul, but it was a start. More importantly, I’m beginning to develop a feel for how to identify patients in that discharge-waiting window before it closes and what frequency I should check in with ED doctors to ask if they have any patients waiting for discharge. Timing, I’m learning, is everything. I also received some welcome news this week: I’ve been given clearance to operate outside of the Emergency Medicine office’s standard hours. Given how much time this process requires, waiting, watching, and hoping a qualifying patient appears, that extended access is very valuable. More hours in the department means more opportunities to catch that brief but crucial window.

Week 8 has been a lesson in expectation management. Research in a real clinical setting is messier and slower than it looks on paper, but I’m adapting. Five surveys in one day is progress, and I’m getting better at this with each visit.