As I have mentioned in my previous posts, one aspect of my job at Winship is to evaluate and grow our current Arts in Health program. We have had this Arts in Health program for several years, but have not had the appropriate research tools to evaluate the impact of the program or to fully assess how well our patients are enjoying the things our program has to offer.
This week at Winship, we finally began our evaluating portion of the project. With the help of our four Masters in Public Health students from the Rollins School of Public Helath at Emory, we developed a patient survey on Google Docs as our measuring tool and began surveying our patients receiving treatment in the infusion center. Of course, I had to first speak to Director of Communications and Media Relations about confidentiality and authorization forms that were required for all patients to sign before participating in our survey. It was interesting to see how much of a barrier this form was for some individuals, especially even though we were not asking for many HIPAA identifiers. We did want to collect demographic characteristics, and this is why we needed the confidentiality agreements, but we did not ask for patients’ name to go on public record, which made some responders feel a lot better about participating.
After completing the confidentiality agreement, we verbally asked patients questions from our survey that took about 10-15 minutes to complete. We are still in the data collecting phase of our project, but we have been able to get a good amount of data so far. My supervisor has specifically asked for us to obtain some form of quantitative data because she already has some qualitative data collected. Going out and collecting data this week made me realize how difficult it is to get an appropriate understanding of a program by only using quantitative means for data collection. So many of my responders wanted to give me verbal, lengthy responses to my questions, rather than staying within the bounds of “strongly disagree to strongly agree”. But I have learned a lot about the appropriate way to phrase a question when evaluating a program, as well as the number of specific question that are necessary in order to get a good idea of how your patient/responder truly feels about a certain topic.
In addition to evaluating the current Arts in Health program, I have also been promoting the updated program and recruiting new artists to volunteer. I am in charge if developing an Open House to describe the Arts in Health program to any artists or art organizations interested joining our program. I am also in charge of creating a Patient and Caregiver Art Day that will take place at the same time as the Open House because we hope to take potential artists on a tour of Winship and show them what it would be like to volunteer as an artists with our patients. This Open House is Friday, November 10th from 2:30pm-4:30pm, and please contact me if you know anyone who may want to come join us!