October 21, 2009

This is my first project week of the year. I got ethics approval a few weeks ago and it was a relief. I started collecting data in the home hemodialysis clinic this week. It’s definitely a time consuming process as the charts are quite thick and often there are chart “thinnings” that are filed elsewhere that I have to dig out. The problem I am running into is that some patients don’t get consistent monthly bloodwork done so there are some instances where I having miss data. Another issue is that the anemia protocol isn’t always followed correctly and I have been documented how many violations there are for each patient. But this is the nature of retrospective chart reviews. I am hoping to have all my data collected by  January/February.

December 6, 2009

Data collection is on-going!  So far I’ve reviewed about 50 charts both in the Home Hemodialysis Clinic and the Community Dialysis Clinic on Hillside. I haven’t encountered any majors issues. Depending on the “thickness” of the chart it can take anywhere form 20 minutes to 45 minutes before I get through one.  There were a few instances were I could not find the MARs and it was extremely frustrating or there was parts of the anemia protocol documentation sheets missing.The good thing about the patients in the community dialysis clinic is they usually get monthly bloodwork so I don’t have as many “gaps” in data as the home hemodialysis patients. I am hoping to finish collecting data in the community dialysis clinic this week and when I get back from vacation I plan to drive up the Duncan Dialysis Clinic.

I also started organizing key points that I want in my manuscript so I’m working on parts of that. I’m planning on writing more of it on my flight to Hong Kong (13 hours!). So I’ll bring my laptop and work at it as I usually cannot sleep on planes anyway.

January 24, 2010

So I have four project weeks left and I’d say I’ve completed about 2/3 of my data collection. I’ll need to do a lot over the next two project weeks to get it all done but I have planned it accordingly. In December, I went up to the Duncan Dialysis Unit for a couple of days to collect data. They have 30 patients or so up to there. I’m going back next week to finish up there. Dan and I decided to submit an amendment to the ethics board at VIHA so we could capture the PD patients as well. Most of the VIHA PD patients are also on the anemia management protocol. The reason we decided to include them was because there are only about 100 HD patients on the protocol and our target sample size is 200. So in order to increase our sample size, we decided to capture these patients as well. Surprisely, the ethics board approved the amendment without any major issues or questions. I was relieved!