By Young Joo Choi
Our time at CanSupport have been largely taken up by home care visits, Day Care, and side projects. Some of the more important ones, such as the Amritsar project and the donor proposals for Day Care programs have its own section but this post is dedicated to the little projects that haven't been mentioned yet.
During our first few weeks, we were given the task of inputing data for the telephone helpline. CanSupport had already computerized their data entries for the calls that the helpline received — anything from names, age, referrals, emotions, and needs. With Birbal's extensive knowledge and skill of analyzing data, they had a comprehensive data sheet full of information but the types of need that each caller had requested was not initially entered. Dr. Reena wants to publish a paper and analyze where the greatest needs of the phones are for the 2016 - 2017 fiscal year. In the renewed Excel sheet, we classified needs into a category corresponding to an abbreviation and manually entered in the data for every call for the first year. We actually finished the job in a matter of a few days but directions weren't clear about making a distinction between HC and HCV (home care and home care visit, where one is solely for information), so we had to repeat the process one more time. This time around, we created a physical key, which helped clarify all of the ambiguous points. After we had all of the data, I used a little bit of R/R Studio to compute and tabulate the number of needs per month and the whole year into a spreadsheet, which was helpful to Dr. Reena, who will be preparing the contents of the paper soon!
The other miscellaneous project is a research study about the pain management of head and neck cancer patients that are under CanSupport's care. The purpose was to determine the effectiveness of palliative care that has been offered to these patients over time. Nurse Sindhu, who is the head nurse, is in charge and has been collecting data for 40 patients throughout multiple visits. The information that were collected were general personal information (age, sex, income, type of cancer), the presence of certain symptoms, and the quality of life. One specific sheet that was used was a modified version of the EORTC-QLQ-C30. We outlined and inputted the data, the test results from around six visits per patient, into an organized Excel file that was given to Nurse Sindhu upon completion. After having gathered all of the numbers, I had the chance to play and analyze with the data a little bit, which was exciting because I finally had the opportunity to utilize the statistical software that I had learned last semester! We'll be writing an abstract for it soon but the rest of the paper will not be complete within the short time that we have left.
These side projects have not only given us glimpses into the research aspect of medicine but it also has proved to us that CanSupport's focus is on quality of life and finding ways to improve their effectiveness — whether it be through the phone or personally through home care visits. CanSupport has not only strived to serve others but also further the understanding of palliative care to improve their care for current and future patients. It has been such a pleasure working for an organization that embraces everyone like family and reminds me of the humanity within us.