Project Title: Evaluating HIV-Patient Experience and access to Emergency General Surgery
Background
In 2023, a UCHealth surgeon and research consulting client reached out for our qualitative research expertise. She was in the process of mentoring a Peruvian surgeon who was conducting a mixed-methods study on experiences of patients living with HIV (PLHIV) and their access to emergency general surgery (EGS) in a low- and middle-income country context. To allow the Peruvian surgeon to focus on the quantitative survey deployment and analysis, the team hired us to conduct the qualitative analysis of interview data with surgeons and PLHIV.
Project Goals
From the get-go, the main goal of the contract with this client was to analyze all the interviews conducted with surgeons and PLHIV, synthesize the data analysis, and draft the qualitative results for a manuscript.
As always, our goal as a consultants on this project was to exceed the expectations of the client. In this case, that meant completing all the necessary work up front, with a commitment to revisit the deliverable of the qualitative results upon the research team’s preparation to submit the manuscript for publication.
Length of Project
Overall, the work for this contract spanned three months from initial contact with the research team, to the final deliverable of a qualitative results section for their manuscript.
Associated Tasks
To complete the scope of work for this project, we executed the following tasks:
- Initial listening session with research team
- Familiarization and finalization of codebook for qualitative analysis
- Follow-up meetings with research team members throughout analysis process
- Data analysis of all provider and patient interviews
- Synthesis of data analysis
- Follow-up meetings with research team to discuss data synthesis and framing the results
- Draft of qualitative results for future mixed-methods manuscript
Project Deliverables
The final and main deliverable for this project was a draft of the qualitative results based on our analysis. These results would later be embedded into a mixed-methods manuscript that incorporates the qualitative interviews with a survey deployed to PLHIV.
In addition to the main deliverable, we also provided the team with code reports based on our analysis of the data using their codebook.
Inside the Sociology
We like to end each project report with a brief reflection on how sociology enabled the successful completion of the project. For this particular project, we got to put our medical sociology hats on and apply our knowledge of healthcare systems and social stigma to our analysis of experiences of PLHIV and accesses EGS. Sociologists discuss stigma as a fundamental cause of health inequality, and our knowledge on the research that suggests such powerful impacts of stigma informed our analysis of the qualitative interviews with both providers and patients.
As always, it was a joy and honor to be a small part of this research, which seeks to make general surgery more accessible to PLHIV in low- and middle-income countries.
