One thing I don’t think we talk about enough as medical students, especially as it becomes more central in our education and important for residency applications, is research. In my experience, bringing a research project through to fruition is as exciting as it is challenging, will push you to ask questions, learn new skills, get confused and frustrated at times but elated at others, and demands hours upon hours of dedicated time and work. From writing the protocol to collecting data to analyzing and writing results, there is something new to discover at every turn, and hopefully at the end, positive change that arises from your efforts.
For my GHAC summer research, I was lucky enough to be able to come into a project that was already at the data collection stage, which for me meant that I could jump right in to working with patients and their families. While data collection looks different for all studies, for me it meant administering surveys aimed at understanding the quality of life of kids born with craniofacial conditions. My project, specifically, compares how the quality of life of these kids may be similar or different in Argentina, Mexico, and the US.
The reality of what data collection looked like for me was visiting these latter two sites through regular Jornadas in Mexico (described more in my last blog post) or just by driving down to the FreshStart clinic at Radys Children’s Hospital in San Diego, an organization dedicated to providing care to kids regardless of their family’s income status. Both these clinics are special in that they draw kids from all over needing care, but while the FreshStart clinic treats both advantaged and disadvantaged kids, the clinic in Mexico primarily caters to the latter group, and as such, allowed us to work with a particularly high-need population in Mexico.
At these two clinics, I would meet with patients and their parents while they were waiting to be seen by their plastic surgeon, see if they wanted to participate in our study, and if so, go over the informed consent form before handing them the surveys delivered on iPads. The whole process from start to end only takes about 20 minutes per family, and in my experience, most are happy to participate and contribute.
After and sometimes alongside data collection is data analysis, which was daunting to someone not very well-versed in operating programs like RStudio or SPSS (and ChatGPT helps too!). My GHAC project gave me the opportunity to brush up on and practice some of these coding skills I had developed during my master’s program, which becomes such a valuable and transferable skill for so many projects.
Some of what we gleaned from preliminary analyses is that across countries, caregivers for children with craniofacial conditions in Mexico and Argentina had more profound impacts on their child’s quality of life than children in the US, particularly related to concerns over their appearance and family support. These findings were independent of family income and child age, and the study helped demonstrate overall the importance of comparing quality of life for kids with craniofacial conditions internationally and investigating underlying mechanisms in individual countries.
With plenty more analyses yet to be run, it’s very cool to see the on-the-groundwork translated to meaningful takeaways that we can hopefully inform policies and practices that allow us to take better care of patients. I am very thankful for GHAC and Dr. Averbach for getting my connected to this wonderful opportunity, and my mentor, Dr. Gosman, for allowing me to take part in her research. A summer very well spent!
