To honor dear Nicole's request-
For those who don't know, my primary area of research is quality of life following burn injury. I do lots of other things, too- clinical outcomes and quality improvement are the biggest- but quality of life is my passion. I figure that if we're able to get people to survive these giant injuries and the difficulties that come with rehabilitation, we have an obligation to help them have the highest quality of life that we can. Some of our survivors just seem to have that happen, though I know it's not actually that simple. What I'm trying to figure out, the question that really drives me, is what is different about those people...and how much of that can we impart to the people who don't have it? I recognize that parts of personality are simple hard-wiring. But adaptive behaviors can benefit almost all of us and I would love to be able to play a role in providing the skill sets that people need to have better quality of life after injury. Or if there's something different that should be occurring in my clinical care...well, I need to know that too.
At the health services meeting I attended the last few days, I became acquainted with this amazing interdisciplinary project that transcends National Institute of Health agencies (thus, "Roadmap"). The Roadmap initiative known as PROMIS (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System) has been developed with the idea of establishing highly reliable and valid item banks that will measure key health outcome domains in chronic diseases. They're marrying existing scales (say, the SF-36 physical functioning domain) with new items that are validated. They've managed to generate a number of domains so far, all of which fall well within the boundaries of the quality of life work that we've been trying to do in burn survivors. Perhaps most importantly, they're looking for chronic disease conditions in which they can validate the PROMIS tools. Now, I recognize that burn injury is an acute event. The effects of burn injury, however, are long-term, and most of our survivors of major burn injury suffer some level of disability for life.
So that's what got me excited and got my brain going. I know, I've been bitching that I've got to cut back my research obligations. While that's true to a point, I also need to keep looking to the future to figure out where to go next- once I get the master list of projects on the Whiteboard purged and/ or finished. I think I've stumbled onto something valuable, or at least something that represents an interesting area to explore.
With that, I've got a few things to do before I an appointment. Back later with my list du jour.
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Now playing: Band Of Heathens - Don't Call On Me
via FoxyTunes