The End

The research is over! This week marked the final presentations for AP Research students and the end of our research projects. After delivering two practice presentations last week under 10 minutes in length (the range we were aiming for was 15-20 minutes), I added another 10 slides to my powerpoint and managed to bring my final presentation up to over 16 minutes. After a morning spent frantically searching for my suit and getting in a few last minute practices, I was relieved to see that I would be giving my presentation in front of only three teachers, two of whom I knew very well.

My presentation went fairly well, and aside from stumbling on my words a few times (say “PCA pump prescription protocol for physicians prescribing pumps to patients” five times fast) and glancing at the clock on the wall every minute or two I think I did as well as I could have. I was well prepared for my oral defense and knew all of my sources by heart, from the information in each source and how it was used to the credibility of each source’s author.

My study’s conclusion, that physicians are not currently doing a sufficient job screening out patients who could suffer ill effects from PCA pump usage, revealed the need for some sort of solution, such as a prescription protocol that physicians could use to properly screen out at-risk patients (my initial planned solution just based on the literature). Asking physicians about the feasibility of such a protocol in a healthcare environment quickly caused me to ditch this solution, as 75% of my respondents believed such a protocol would be an “undue burden” on their work. Thankfully, the short answer questions of my survey allowed me to find an alternative solution to PCA pump prescription errors, increased physician education.

After looking further into the solution proposed by my survey respondents, I found that this solution has failed in the past. After already losing my initial solution (a prescription protocol) due to its lack of feasibility, I was determined to find an aspect of increased physician education that could serve as a viable solution. I found that in the early 2000’s, when healthcare organizations first attempted to lower PCA mortality rates with increased education, they took a very passive approach to this education, creating booklets and videos that physicians could choose to seek out if they desired more information about prescribing PCA pumps. Since this attempt at education didn’t work, and many of my survey respondents still continue to call for increased education today, I believe a more active approach to physician education could find more success. This approach, which could consist of mandatory training for PCA pump prescribers and opioid medication providers in general, will hopefully aid physicians in identifying patients who should not be given PCA pumps.

A solution to this problem could save millions of dollars per year for taxpayers, hospitals, and patients and hopefully work to lower the high mortality rate of PCA pump errors, which currently rides at over four times that of any other medication related error.

Thank you for reading my blog posts and following my research!

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