So. Much. Data
Seven years ago, Mardi and Jennifer started collecting a lot of data. What were our admissions, diagnoses, outcomes, categories? We have been able to watch our mortality fall, watch our codes decrease, watch how our kids with malnutrition get better. Not just thinking it’s happening – we can actually track it.
Around the same time, we started presenting at the Kenyan Pediatric Association to get our protocols out and to make sure people in the country knew what we were doing in Kijabe. It has been an amazing journey, even if I did grumble a lot when we first got here about putting in all the data points in our database.
When I gave my talk on research in Greece last year, I talked about using research to solve problems you see in your day to day life – to take it from frustration to really looking closely at the problem to fix it. Our clinical officers and interns did that this year – answering questions about CPAP and surfactant, about TB clinical presentations, about ventilator mortality, and predicting sodium levels.
This week, with help from the pediatric emergency and critical care fellowship, we officially hired a research clinical officer to audit our ICU and emergency care, help us coordinate our data collection in real time, and move studies forward. This will open doors for collecting data with even more purpose and direction, hopefully making it easier to publish the amazing things happening.
Below are the 8 posters we presented, and so many hours of work went into looking at our data. We have had two research bootcamps in my living room so far, and have another one planned for next month to get the publications rolling.
Angst to action :).
