How do I classify outreach hours?

[sosolovesapplesauce]

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I'm a clinical research coordinator but I've done a lot of outreach work in my position. My department go to various health related venues, food banks, churches, etc. to spread awareness about opioid misuse and stigma. Every week or so I would go to these events to provide education. My job was teaching people how to use naloxone, I would wait as my coworker presented on stigma surrounding OUD and/or other OUD related topics and then I would come in and do a shorter explanation on how to identify a overdose, how and when to administer naloxone and what to say to the 911 operator when you called them. Sometimes we would have booths and I would talk to people one on one as they walked by and sometimes I would speak to a crowd. Sometimes we would give surveys out and that data is being analyzed for a future publication.

Do these count as research hours because they were preformed during my research position? Or are they clinical hours? I was paid so they certainly were not volunteer.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

If it's part of your job responsibilities as a CRC, it goes under your employment as a CRC. If your CRC experience is one of your most meaningful, expand on it in your MME.

I don't consider it "research" unless it is part of an IRB-approved protocol.

The people you are reaching out to are not patients, and you are not touching EHRs.

It sounds like you are working like a community health worker, so it would be an employment responsibility IMO.

 

[Catalystik]

I'm a clinical research coordinator but I've done a lot of outreach work in my position. My department go to various health related venues, food banks, churches, etc. to spread awareness about opioid misuse and stigma. Every week or so I would go to these events to provide education. My job was teaching people how to use naloxone, I would wait as my coworker presented on stigma surrounding OUD and/or other OUD related topics and then I would come in and do a shorter explanation on how to identify a overdose, how and when to administer naloxone and what to say to the 911 operator when you called them. Sometimes we would have booths and I would talk to people one on one as they walked by and sometimes I would speak to a crowd. Sometimes we would give surveys out and that data is being analyzed for a future publication.

Do these count as research hours because they were preformed during my research position? Or are they clinical hours? I was paid so they certainly were not volunteer.

You could carve out those hours and label it as Teaching.

 

[LizzyM]

I agree that "teaching" might be the best descriptor here. Teaching members of the general public is a useful experience as it mirrors some roles you may have as a medical student and physician.

The problem as I see it with "clinical research coordinator" as an AMCAS entry is that it is neither research in that the coordinator seldom has a role in designing the study or analyzing the data and communicating the results of the study and neither is it clinical care if the people with whom you interact are research participants and not patients. (And I say this as someone who has served in that role.) That's not to say that it isn't a valuable experience (and a paying job!) but it should be an adjunct to some other clinical experience and not your sole research experience if you are applying to research-intensive med schools.

 

[sosolovesapplesauce]

I agree that "teaching" might be the best descriptor here. Teaching members of the general public is a useful experience as it mirrors some roles you may have as a medical student and physician.

The problem as I see it with "clinical research coordinator" as an AMCAS entry is that it is neither research in that the coordinator seldom has a role in designing the study or analyzing the data and communicating the results of the study and neither is it clinical care if the people with whom you interact are research participants and not patients. (And I say this as someone who has served in that role.) That's not to say that it isn't a valuable experience (and a paying job!) but it should be an adjunct to some other clinical experience and not your sole research experience if you are applying to research-intensive med schools.

The tasks I described here take up around 10% of my role. My other tasks are communicating with IRB, creating the IRB master project and IRB submission, working with the team on study design, analyzing data, writing literature reviews, and helping with grant submissions. I've been working in research full time for a while now and don't need any more hours. I just have little to no clinical hours so thst's why I was wondering if that part of my work counted. I plan on getting a reseach coodinator role that will allow me to collect patient data directly so that I can increase my clinical hours. It's good that they count as teaching hours because my experience defiently needs more variety haha most of my hours are research.
Also I meant to write clinical research assistant, that was my former role. My current role is Epi Research Coordinator.

 

[LizzyM]

Your work in "research" may or may not count depending on how highly a specific committee values human subjects research experience (IRB, grant writing and all that) vs hypothesis development and testing. Some narrowly focused committee members believe that wet lab research is the only research deserving of the name and others will be more broad in what they accept. It all depends and you can't really see behind that curtain.

Clinical experience with patients, even if it is only volunteer work in a pediatric unit or emergency department is going to be expected. You can't expect research experience, particularly with people in an epidemiology study, to cover what adcoms are looking for with regard to your clinical experience.

 

[sosolovesapplesauce]

Your work in "research" may or may not count depending on how highly a specific committee values human subjects research experience (IRB, grant writing and all that) vs hypothesis development and testing. Some narrowly focused committee members believe that wet lab research is the only research deserving of the name and others will be more broad in what they accept. It all depends and you can't really see behind that curtain.

Clinical experience with patients, even if it is only volunteer work in a pediatric unit or emergency department is going to be expected. You can't expect research experience, particularly with people in an epidemiology study, to cover what adcoms are looking for with regard to your clinical experience.

It is highly bizarre to think of my experience not being considered research by anyone. I've been in involved in nearly every step of the research process. Since my junior year of undergrad I've worked with IRB-approved human subjects research with published outcomes which involved hypothesis development, methodology, data collection, analysis, and writing peer-reviewed publications. I have a MS in statistics and trust me when you're doing statistical analysis the subject area matters even less. This high dimensional dataset could be thousands of DNA sequences from a single patient or it could be thousands of CUI codes from a single patients EHR data. We might fit a similar elastic net model to reduce dimensionality on both dataset, but is this statistician's task not research when it's applied to human subjects data? The idea that wet lab research is the only real research is a opinion I've never heard and I've worked with professors in several different fields of science. If not research then what have I been doing my entire adult life. In a lot of ways clinical and epi datasets are harder to work with than controlled lab data because of missing data, selection bias, confounding, and the generally messiness of real world patient data.

 

[LizzyM]

I stand corrected then. What I more often see is someone handling IRB forms, DSMB reports from the sponsor, making sure human subjects training is up to date for the study team, etc, etc.... essentially clerical work for a bunch of clinical trials. There is no intellectual contribution to the work and often no direct contact with research participants except perhaps to book appointments and/or process reimbursement/payment for participation. Doing the work of a trained statistical analyst is a different kettle of fish.