My First Assignment!

So over the weekend after my first meeting with Diana I thought about what I wanted to work on. I chose the Physician Satisfaction study. I decided on this one because I wanted to see any correlations between how satisfied physicians and oncologists were with their job, life and income and compare it with the care they provided or were able to provide.

Diana emailed me after we met on September 11 and told me she left packets of reading to do. One set was about physician/oncologist satisfaction and burnout, and one set is on stage at diagnosis and the contribution of neighborhood factors. I was to read them and write one page summaries on them. She had also emailed me about a mentoring meeting she was going to on September 21 and invited me to go. Diana said it was with her Center on Minority Aging research--which funds some of her work with OCAPICA's PI community partners. She said it would be a great opportunity for me to go and meet some of the UCLA School of Medicine faculty who are also involved with research on health disparities. So I had to rearrange my schedule for this because the meeting was on a Monday 3-5p and I usually work at 2p on Mondays. :/ I was hoping I could attend but was not sure if I could get it switched...

Anyway! So Diana and I met again on Monday, September 14, at 10am. I told her I was interested in doing the Physician Satisfaction. She showed me again the surveys the physicians and oncologists were sent. She went over the questions the physicias were asked and she explained how they could affect their satisfaction. She taught me about the different insurances (Medicare, Medicaid, private) and how they affected what the physicians could or could not do or how the facility and administration in which a physician works coud affect the care patients receive. And how a physician is paid or the size of their patient load could affect physician satisfaction and patient care. There's so many things that affect the care patients receive and I never thought about it beyond educational and financial barriers.

Diana then gave me my homework. It was a stack about 1.5 inches thick of research papers that I needed to read. One stack was on epidemiology research about cancer, another stack was many other reseach articles on physician satifaction and burnout, and the last stack of articles were from Diana's research. I was to read them to get background on the research and then to look at the research done by others and see what we can or should look at in our research. And then I was supposed to also summarize the articles in one page. Diana said she would send me a list of things to pay attention for in the articles--which at this point I was thinking to myself "WHEW!" because since I was nervous about messing up I did not want to summarize too much or too little...

We scheduled to meet later that week on Thursday, September 17. So I left her office which is down the street from UCLA and went on campus to the library to get started on the reading. I counted each article and they totaled 24. Some were short and some were long. I was in the library for a couple hours trying to read. Research articles are definitely hard to read. You definitely need a dictionary because the authors know what they're talking about and know what words they use but that doesnt mean the reader (like me) will know!

I got through half of one article, it was in the epidemiology of cancer stack or articles. It was a cancer study done on African American men and women because they have higher cancer mortality rates when compared to whites. I had to stop reading and go to work at 2p so I still had 23.5 articles to read or get through... haha..