So I volunteer at my local hospital and the development team wants to see how the hospital is doing in terms of sanitation and health among the physicians and of the facilities. They brought this to the infectious disease department and in the hospital and they are starting to do it and asked me to help because of my background in microbiology and I want to go into infectious disease. Basically me and some other members of the department will be going around randomly taking tests of physicians hands/door handles/areas of the hospital looking for how "clean" the hospital is, then I have to wright up a report and compare it to other hospitals with the team and present it to the development team. Just wondering if this counts as research because technically I'm trying to figure out a problem and such but it doesn't really seem like the typical research people might think of.
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I'd call it an internal quality improvement project. It is not potentially publishable outside the institution.
I agree, with the caveat that you could publish it if you've implemented a new or experimental infection control policy and are benchmarking it against similar institutions.
OP, it would be nice if you could ask if you can include stethoscopes in the microbial survey you'll do.
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I count it as research of a sort.
You aren't even attempting to generate generalizable new knowledge so in that respect, it is not research.
You are using laboratory techniques to assess the presence of microbes on surfaces in a clinical setting. You will be using this to benchmark the cleanliness of the facility and compare it to other facilities. (where is that data coming from?)
You don't have a hypothesis to test. It could be called exploratory to research. In other words, after this initial assessment, it might be determined that X is a problem area. An intervention would then be initiated to improve the problem area. The intervention might be instituted on one unit with another unit serving as a control group or it may be enough to show, quality assurance style, that you identified a problem, made a corrective action plan, and assessed the outcome after then plan was carried out.
It is valuable work but not quite "research". You might call it "volunteer, clinical". It is a stretch of my definition of "clinical" but I think you will be close enough to patients as you collect these swabs that you can call it clinical.
You are using laboratory techniques to assess the presence of microbes on surfaces in a clinical setting. You will be using this to benchmark the cleanliness of the facility and compare it to other facilities. (where is that data coming from?)
You don't have a hypothesis to test. It could be called exploratory to research. In other words, after this initial assessment, it might be determined that X is a problem area. An intervention would then be initiated to improve the problem area. The intervention might be instituted on one unit with another unit serving as a control group or it may be enough to show, quality assurance style, that you identified a problem, made a corrective action plan, and assessed the outcome after then plan was carried out.
It is valuable work but not quite "research". You might call it "volunteer, clinical". It is a stretch of my definition of "clinical" but I think you will be close enough to patients as you collect these swabs that you can call it clinical.
