Shenay is a Research Assistant at the Magee Women’s Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “One of the nation’s top hospitals specializing in women, Magee combines a wealth of specialty services with a traditional focus on gynecologic and obstetric services.”
Transcript
>> Okay my name is Sinead Jeffrey [assumed spelling] and I am a research assistant at Magee-Women's Hospital. So what I do is a lot of clinical-based research with dealing with women of reproductive age, HIV prevention and contraception research. A busy day for us would be definitely a day booked full of research participants. They're all volunteers who would like to be a part of our studies and like I said we do a lot with women so all of our studies are focused on that. And a typical day would be a visit for a research study, typically takes two to three hours so we have about three or four of those and in a very busy day we could even have up to five. So a day is very long for me. I work from 7 to 5 p.m. every day. So I work on two different sides of my job, the clinical part, which is actually when the research assistant is there and then the data part when they leave essentially, the paperwork. So when they're there we do a lot of help, basically taking in their information. We do a lot of demographic assessments, physical assessments which includes like vital signs. I also take people's blood so we run this blood for like HIV analysis and collect their blood counts, things like that. So I get to take this blood and also I assist the clinician, usually a doctor or a nurse-practitioner in the exam room. We do different things such as cervical and then we draw biopsies. We get to assist even in the OR and also we get to do like ultrasounds with these women. And the second part of that is basically gathering all that information that we collected from that day or that visit and transcribing it on to paper or on the computer. And since we're clinical research a lot of our studies are sponsored blood so what that means, there's basically someone in charge of our study that we send this information to and they get to analyze it and it's usually towards the end goal of bringing something to market so we do definitely the legwork of that. That data could, we enter it like I said. We also do, it depends on the study, different analyses of that data which could be on Excel or Stata, things like that, data analysis tools so we get to do a lot of that and it's constant data. So like I said up to four to five visits a day means a lot of paperwork towards the end.
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