Catching up…

Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, S Court 2024

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted and gaps like that usually indicate that I’ve been busy behind the scenes…which I have! So here’s a quick catch-up of what’s been occurring…

To ethics, or not to ethics?

Oh. My. Word. This has been a headache and a half!? I spent 3-4 weeks to-ing and fro-ing with the Ethics Committee, updating, correcting and tweaking my documents. One of the things I quickly came to realise was that they had clearly only read the Plain English summary, rather than the Consent form, Participant Information Sheet or indeed the very detailed study Protocol which they had requested, and I had duly sent. Sigh. Maybe it always happens like this, but what’s the point of spending weeks on a complex document and then sending it to people, if they’re not going to read it?? Some of the questions were incredibly basic and could have easily been answered by reading the documents I sent…grr!

And to top it all off, when I finally did get ethical approval at the end of July, I sent off the Consent Form and Participant Information sheet to all my potential discusssion group members, only to realise that I hadn’t updated the dates on all the forms and I had to resubmit for Ethical approval again?! Gah! Fortunately this time they came back to me very quickly.

Curious Conversations

In the meantime, I was busy trying to organise 3 separate meetings, for 3 separate discussion groups, two of which were online and the third being a hybrid meeting (thank goodness for Doodle Poll! The free version is an absolute godsend!). Naturally, it being August, lots of people were away at different times, but in the end I had four people for the PPI Leads group, which included a public contributor, five people in the Community & Civic partners group, which included a community member from the Sandbox project and at least eight Patient Research Ambassadors (PRAs), including one person who joined us online. I was pleased with the diversity of people represented in the groups, both demographically, but also organisationally and hopefully this will be a good reflection of the local area in general.

I recorded the meetings and sent them to a company called TypeOut to transcribe them for me. Having attempted this in the past for the Somerstown Stories project, I now deeply appreciate and value the skill of transcribers and had included money in my budget for this precise purpose! As I was on leave at the end of August, I was able to book the economy service, which ended up being under-budget! I’ll be getting the transcripts back next week and then I’ll be working with a group of PRAs to review the transcripts and look for common themes and links.

Mini Scoping Review

As mentioned previously, In Praise of Librarians, I have been learning how to do academic database searches. There are many of them, and learning how to search effectively, isn’t as easy as it sounds…! However, after some help from Aaron the Lovely Librarian (TM), I presented a list of around 34 potential articles to a small group of three PRAs who had volunteered to help me with this task. We then rated the articles on how relevant they were to my research question, from 1 to 4 (4 being highly relevant and 1 being barely relevant). That got the list down to about 27. I then shared the documents between us: the PRAs had 5 each and I took the remaining 10 and we agreed to read through them, summarise what we’d found and then meet again to share our thoughts. I’m sorry to say that I only managed 3 before we had our meeting (somewhat distracted by sorting out ethical approval and Doodle polls), but I will read the rest of the articles, as I’m finding it very useful – if somewhat tiring – to read this much dense information. I will write a blog post on what I find, in the near future.

So that’s what’s been happening lately! I’m currently on leave, but will be back after the Bank Holiday and then I’m on the home straight as it were – I have until Sept 25th before this internship ends. Oh, and while all this was going on, I also submitted an application for the NIHR Pre-application Support Fund, which, if I’m successful, will give me some funding to buy out my time (up to one day a week for six months) as well as money for training and support, to help me submit an application for a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship – which essentially a Masters. At this point I’m pushing on all the doors to see what opens and I’ll choose my path from there. I should hear sometime in October whether or not I’ve been successful. Look out for an update in a couple of months time!