A new direction

At last a break though! I was trundling along trying to move beyond the planning stage, when I met a lady who is researching a similar topic area as me. We talked about us working together and, following a few weeks of waiting, last week she finally agreed that I could work with her. So I'm off in a new research direction.

You remember I talked about the model of adherence support for HIV treatment was very different to TB? Well, this lady, Salla Munro has implemented the HIV model with TB patients. My original plan was to compare patient experience of HIV and TB treatment support, to ask theoretically what use the HIV model would be for TB. Now I’ll be helping to evaluate how the new model was worked with TB treatment- in practice.

I’m excited because it means I have someone to work with and can hopefully learn lots about qualitative research along the way. It also means I have jumped past the hurdles of gaining ethics approval and securing permission from clinics to do research - usually both arduous tasks.

My responsibility is to organise focus groups with patients to find out how they have experienced taking TB treatment, and then analyse the data with Salla. There are 5 clinics in various parts of Cape with the new intervention. Plus we'll be looking at two clinics with, the classic, direct observation. The work is expected to take until March.

So this week I’ve been getting an introduction to the clinics. They are all in Cape Town's townships. Busy places, much informal housing, and home to millions of Cape Town's poor. On Wednesday I visited 3 of the clinics and in the process got: a new name (Loorwarzi - Xhosa for knowledge), 3 marriage proposals (I think it was a joke, I said no in any case) and met, no exaggeration, 60 new people (treatment supporters, clinic staff etc). The next two days I’ve been heading back to the townships to explore the possibilities for a venue for the focus groups.

Overall though, its great to be out of the office and getting stuck into something new.