Furthering the jet-set image we StratiGrad students seem to be getting, I spent January visiting the study sites for my PhD project. My project is a sub-study of a large transfusion trial (TRACT) taking place between 2 hospitals in eastern Uganda, so I was lucky enough to go out to set things up and get the ball rolling. A welcome side effect was missing the worst of the winter here in London, and managing to just miss the rainy season in Uganda too!
I visited the regional referral hospitals at Mbale and Soroti towns in eastern Uganda, the two sites where the sub-study will be run, spending the majority of the time in the slightly larger but significantly dustier town of Mbale. Apparently between it being the dry season, and every road in town being pulled up for maintenance, conditions were perfect for the bright red/orange dust I was to become familiar with. I’m still finding it in clothes, books, bags and nooks and crannies everywhere!
As in any research, there’s a mountain of paperwork to be arranged, so I spent my first couple of weeks preparing source documents, case report forms, SOPs, data collection databases and the likes. This was thankfully with the help of the friendly and hardworking local researchers. Afterward I got to travel to Kampala for the TRACT annual trial steering committee meeting, where I met researchers from the other hospitals, and from the Medical Research Council from the UK. It was a great experience to see how clinical trial governance works in practice, by which I mean it’s nowhere near as boring as it sounds on paper! I presented my research proposal to a room of about 50 academics, clinicians, and researchers which was daunting, but great practice for conferences and my upcoming early stage review. It was well received, and questions prompted some useful discussions for directing the sub-study.
My last week was spent recruiting patients into the sub-study… I say recruiting, but really trying to recruit is more accurate. As luck would have it, in Mbale there was a shortage of blood for transfusions so no recruitment could take place, while in Soroti there was plenty of blood but no patients! Finally by Thursday of my last week, we recruited the first of the sub-study patients which was a big milestone, but only the start of lot a work.
It wasn’t all work however, and I got to do some sight seeing on nearby Mount Elgon, and Sipi waterfalls. I didn’t manage to do either a safari, or see mountain gorillas on this visit but I’ll be making sure to do both on my next visit.
Also as a dietitian, hence preoccupied with food, and since I’ll be analysing the diets of the study children, I made a point of trying out as many local foods as I could. Highlights included many types of bananas (the ones we get in the UK pale by comparison!), locally grown passion fruit, pineapple and mangoes, chicken-on-a-stick (which quickly became an obsession), posho, chapati, and local coffee (puts the freeze dried stuff to shame).
Transitioning back from 33C to 3C wasn’t as bad as expected, and I have my Irish heritage to account for the entire lack of a tan. If all goes to plan I’ll go back out to visit again later in the year to see how it’s all progressing. Can’t wait!!
Tunaalabagana Uganda 🙂
Kevin