Implementation of a USIG research initiative to improve productivity of student involvement in research

Introduction: Ultrasound has increased in medical education. More students are becoming exposed to ultrasound during the undergraduate medical education. Advanced programs in ultrasound training have been described along... [ view full abstract ]

Introduction: Ultrasound has increased in medical education. More students are becoming exposed to ultrasound during the undergraduate medical education. Advanced programs in ultrasound training have been described along with student activity groups at medical school to help interface students with ultrasound opportunities. A committee infrastructure of USIG has previously been described at a national conference (Committee structure of USIG- WCUME 2014). Using a 10 step process as a template for regular meetings, an executive group constructed a schedule for the entire year. This project describes a research initiative to bring similar research teams together in order to increase research productivity in a tangible fashion

Methods: A research committee was convened and demarcated by an executive subset and a member subset charged with specific tasks to increase the research infrastructure designed to get more students involved. These tasks included setting regular meetings and setting the agenda, providing education at each meeting to describe a stage of the research process, project summation and status by research team members, barrier and challenge identification, recruitment of personnel to research teams, problem solving, sharing of resources, and ultimately manuscript preparation. Demographic data was collected at each meeting and reported as outcome trends of research productivity- number of projects, number of team members, rank, years of ultrasound and research experience, abstracts, and manuscripts. Data was collated in excel and analysis was performed using SPSS.

Results: Twelve meetings were scheduled over an entire year with an agenda of an Intro meeting to overview the project, 10 steps highlighted an educational scaffold of the research process, and a summary meeting to assess the year’s activities. Medical students from all four years attended meetings and x number worked on y projects. There were … projects that had presentations at the local or national level. The number of manuscript submissions was… Accepted manuscripts by years end was recorded as…

Conclusions: Administrating a research committee agenda to encourage research participation and productivity can be achieved. Coordinating times for research teams to come together and share ideas, challenges, and solutions may be a way to improve research productivity at an institution. Engaging medical students during all four years of the education process may be a way to improve academic faculty development and should be a future direction of these types of initiatives. This project demonstrated that organizing regular research meeting times with a 10 step scaffold on how to perform research became a framework that brought research teams together and improved research productivity in key metrics. These included numbers of personnel involved in research, number of active projects, number of abstracts and submitted manuscripts. Future research may reveal whether this framework could be applied at other institutions.