Presentation Skills and Content

I have spent this past week writing my powerpoint presentation and script, and generally planning out how the presentation will go. As my AP Seminar class last year consisted of many recorded presentations, I decided to look back over the recordings and identify things to improve on. The main problems with my presentations in the past have been in my body language and tone.

With regards to my body language, I need to be more engaged with my audience. I had a tendency to stand with my hands crossed in front of my body while speaking, a very closed-off stance. A more open stance, perhaps with my hands to the side, would be more appropriate for this research presentation. In addition, adding more movement to my presentation, possibly by switching sides of the room every few slides, could keep my audience interested with my presentation.

In addition to improving my body language, I need to increase my volume a substantial amount and mumble less, as my quiet and strung-together words were lost in my Seminar video recording. Reducing my use of filler words such as “um” and “like” will improve my presentation as well, and writing a detailed script (and practicing it often) should allow me to avoid these meaningless words. Finally, I decided that my voice could use a lot more variation and emphasis, as it can come across as very monotonous when I use the same impassive voice to say everything.

With regards to the actual content of my presentation, the vast majority of my time will be spent on the background behind my research and explaining my question in detail. As PCA pumps and anesthesiology devices in general are not common knowledge, establishing a base level of understanding in my audience will be essential in order to get my results across. During my practice presentations, I will be sure to determine whether my explanation can effectively get background information on PCA pumps across to my audience. In addition to this background information, I need to make the impact of my research clear to the audience (both the economic impact and the impact on patient health).

For my methodology, results, and conclusion, I will use graphs and charts (both of which I relied heavily upon in my AP seminar presentation) to make my findings perfectly clear to my viewers. In addition, direct quotes from some of my survey respondents will allow me to show both the impact of my research and the proposed solution: increased physician education.

Over the next week, I will continue to write my script and work on my powerpoint presentation, as well as revise my paper for the last time, mostly to finish compiling my sources into one concise works cited page.

WORD COUNT: 465

Finishing up my paper

Hello again!

As this research project is coming to a close, I have spent the past week combining all the different pieces of my research paper: the abstract, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion. The most challenging parts of this were balancing the tone of the paper as a whole, verifying all of my sources, and writing the abstract.

As the different parts of this paper were written over a few months, the tone of each section was slightly different, likely influenced by my plans for how the research would end at the time and what results I was expecting (this changed as I met consultants and started receiving results). I went through the entire paper after writing my discussion and looked at it again with the knowledge that anesthesiologists didn’t want the institution of a PCA pump prescription protocol but rather increased education on opioid medications and PCA instruments. I rewrote several sections to improve the flow of the entire piece, but was sure to also not allow my final results to color my initial hypothesis and background.

Verifying my sources was incredibly challenging (and is still an ongoing process). As the sources were compiled over several months, some of them have been put into a bibliography while others were stored on many different documents in different formats. In addition to putting all of my sources into my final paper in a works cited page, I have been going through each source and ensuring it accomplishes what I intended. This entails searching for each source online, identifying what the claims the source was supporting up in the paper, and determine whether or not the source is actually able to back up my paper’s claims. This was challenging, as the sources I had that didn’t have direct links were usually hidden in large medical databases. In addition, it seems that my access to MedScape, a website from which I had found a large number of my sources, took a large number of their anesthesiology papers off the free section of their website. Rather than pay to gain access to these papers, I have had to look for alternative sources to support the same points in my paper, a task that has taken multiple days so far.

Writing the abstract for this paper was probably the easiest task I have had to achieve this week. Once the results and discussion were completed, writing the abstract was simply summarizing each section I had already finished. The most challenging part of this was managing to get the material from a 4000 word paper into my 250 word abstract without losing any meaning. After writing a couple of drafts that I was unable to cut below 500 words, I decided to cut out a majority of the background information from my abstract and instead focused on the results and solution I found: that doctors were failing to properly screen out patients from PCA pump complications and needed more education on opioid medications and delivery systems.

Over the next week, I will finish my work verifying my sources and begin work on my presentation, which I will practice and complete in the upcoming weeks.

Initial Results

Hello all!

I have finally received data from anesthesiologists at every institution I have contacted, and was pleased to find that the physicians completing my surveys took the time to write detailed responses to my short answer questions, explaining their views on why PCA pump prescription protocols would help patients but are also detrimental to their work. Every single response I have received thus far has indicated that instituting a protocol every physician has to go through before prescribing a PCA pump would serve to benefit patients. However, 75% of my respondents also indicated that this protocol would be a detriment to their work (when taking into account the time it would take to go through every test on the protocol).

Many of the anesthesiologists who took my survey suggested ways to remedy this discrepancy, with most suggesting that increased education of physicians on the possible complications that could arise from PCA pumps could reduce the need for a prescription protocol. Respondents to the survey expressed that a physician should be incredibly familiar with the details of the patient’s medical history (reducing the need for a PCA pump prescription protocol) and that anybody with the power to prescribe opioids (not even just in PCA pumps) should undergo mandatory additional training.

In hospitals without a current PCA pump prescription protocol, about half of the physicians surveyed took into account a patient’s cognitive ability and physical ability to handle a PCA pump before prescribing one. One respondent mentioned that if a patient seemed confused about the pump technology and application, the hospital would have a nurse educate said patient and family members on rules of PCA pumps and important complications that could arise.

I made sure to attach a contact form to both the beginning and end of my survey, in case any of the survey takers had any questions/comments, and was pleased to hear back from a few physicians requesting additional information on a few of my questions. The comments I received revealed that I may have failed at some times to make a very important distinction: while a history of substance abuse is definitely a factor that affects how exactly a PCA pump should be programmed or whether it is the ideal pain management solution for a patient, it is not a pre-existing condition that would make a PCA pump immediately apparent as an ineffective management tool. When programmed to account for a history of or ongoing substance abuse, studies have found PCA pumps to be incredibly effective in treating the post-surgical pain of drug users (or past abusers).

I hope to finish up the rest of my research in the next week, and am still taking in survey responses from one of the larger hospitals in the Scottsdale area. While I have received at least one response from every major hospital in the city, my overall number of responses is still very limited and should grow in the coming week. Next week I will provide an updated view of my results and analyze any large changes in my data.

WORD COUNT: 512