Global Injury Research Implementation: Reframing Obstacles as Opportunities

S. Ariane Christie, M.D., Resident Research Fellow in General Surgery, recently authored a post, Global Injury Research Impementation: Reframing Obstacles as opportunities", on the Association for Academic Surgery blog. In the post, Dr. Christie describes the many challenges she and her team had to face as she set out to do her community-based survey on injury in Southwest Cameroon, ranging from acclimating to the geographical barriers to data collection to learning about cultural differences on the ground.

Of particular note were the culture-specific challenges that were recalcitrant to both anticipation by our local partners and detection on survey pretesting. For example, in rural communities, certain people were hesitant to report injuries because of the belief that discussing injury or illness could actually bring it about—a concern that none of our Cameroonian team members had heard before. Obtaining accurate financial data was made more challenging due to participant concerns that information would be shared with the government to increase taxes, or, conversely, that subjects might potentially be reimbursed for injury expenditures. And injury itself, which was a concrete, easily-definable entity in our taxonomy, was often difficult to distinguish from other types of illnesses for our participants.

Dr. Christie concludes her post with four take-home lessons and frames the assortment of challenges she faced as opportunities through which she learned more about the community she and her team were studying.