SUCCESS image credits to the_chosen_pessimist
(http://the-chosen-pessimist.deviantart.com/art/SUCCESS-100186742)
Well it has been a while since I wrote an update on our progress. So I suspect I have a lot to write about in this update post. February and March were very exciting months for us and I am pleased to say that the projects are progressing pretty much as well as we could possibly hope for. I love the photo above, I saw a presentation once where someone used this, and it is just such a great photo – perfectly demonstrates that feeling of yes – I’ve done it. Well we haven’t quite done it yet, but we are feeling pretty good about where we have got to so far so I thought this was a fitting image for this post!
Pharmacy Student Study Update
I have now reached the end of recruitment with our current 4th year Pharmacy students. Our total number of participants hit 43 – so we have no quite reached our target for the first (of 2) experiments with the pharmacy students. However, all 43 participants provided complete sets of data (for which I am very thankful) so they can all be part of the analysis. I am going to set about analysing this data now and see if we have found anything, but as we are 9 short of our minimum sample size of 52 for experiment 1 (we based this on Cohen’s power primer paper) I expect we will need to recruit and test some more participants. If the analyses don’t show anything significant yet (my sneak peaks definitely suggest there may be some trends) I will recruit the remaining 9 (or a few more if we can) from the 3rd year students once they have sat their dispensing exams next month.
I had completed the qualitative arm of experiment 1 at the end of 2011 so I am slowly transcribing this data and need to start analysing that too.
Community Pharmacist Study Update
To date we have 5 of the large multiple pharmacies signed up (this includes community pharmacies based in supermarkets). They all wrote back within a few days of receiving our letter and one company even rang to say how interested they were! We also have been contacted by a few community pharmacists (even before we sent out recruitment letters) who have seen our media coverage and said they would like to take part! We are thrilled by this response. We have yet to contact individual pharmacists, but we have our first project management group meeting on Thursday and we wanted to hold off before we spoke to our key advisors to make sure whether they had any hints and tips on how best to approach individual pharmacists (that we haven’t already thought of).
This brings me onto our second item – our project management group (PMG). I can’t quite believe we have managed to do this, but, we have a rather prestigious set of individuals (who I won’t name just yet as I haven’t asked them if I can) all involved in UK pharmacy practice either at a strategic, academic or practice level who have agreed to be members of our PMG. The first meeting is this Thursday (5th April 2012) which I am preparing for at the moment. This meeting will just be an introduction to the project, but we will meet 3 more times before the end of the project to discuss our findings and prepare our reports to PTECO and plan journal and conference papers. The members of our PMG have been specifically selected to give a local and national strategic view on the impact our data may have on practice. They may also have alternative interpretations of our results to offer, given their insights into community pharmacy practice across organisations, experiences of running a community pharmacy and/or as a community pharmacist. This will ensure our research stays firmly grounded in UK pharmacy practice. Personally, I cannot wait for this first meeting, it is a huge opportunity for me to meet these individuals, nevermind have them involved in my doctoral research.
I think this study will move a lot quicker than the pharmacy student study so I hope to be providing very regular updates on our progress with it.
All in all, things are looking very good! What a lucky PhD student I am!
