Week 5 - Ashley

I can't believe there's only 2 weeks left of immersion!

This week was a lot more focused on my research project that I briefly mentioned in last week's blog. The study is called Frailty as a predictor for the of post-operative care in elderly hip fracture patients. The purpose of this study is to determine the usefulness of patient frailty in predicting outcome. The hypothesis is that hip fracture patients with higher preoperative frailty should have increased risk for complications leading to postoperative admission to it intensive care unit  and/or surgical step-down units. The study is completely voluntary to all of Dr. Lane's patients. We managed to get 13 patients to volunteer last week. The study requires the patient to fill out a walking speed questionnaire, a series of questions that address their walking ability, and then we measure their walking speed over a distance of 15 feet three times.

All of Dr. Lane's patients have been great with participating in the study, and it will be nice to have data by the end of immersion. There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm excited to finish everything up these next 2 weeks.