Blog Post 5

Although I still enjoy the topic of our research project, recent challenges have made it difficult to produce a product that I can be proud of. For WaterAid, Priyanka and I are assessing the level of compliance of hospital staff to the Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene Recommended Minimum Standards for Infection Prevention & Control in Health Care Facilities at the University Teaching Hospital. We have already interviewed doctors, nurses, and the Environmental Health Officer of the hospital to gain a better understanding of the hygiene and sanitation conditions in the facility. We had also planned to assess the School Health and Nutrition Program in local schools but due to the inefficiency of some our colleagues in the office, we were unable to complete this part of our research project. This was very disheartening to me because throughout our time with WaterAid, we made an effort to continuously check in with our bosses to make sure that our research project was on-par with what they wanted. They expressed to us that they would appreciate it if we could look into health conditions at the schools. As a result, I’m very worried that the product we produce at the end will not be accepted with excitement. In order to speak to the head teachers and administration in the schools, we had to receive a letter of permission from the Ministry of General Education. To receive this letter, a letter from WaterAid was requested from the ministry. Despite our continuous emails and in-person reminders, we received this much anticipated letter nearly 2 weeks after our initial request. When we finally delivered this letter to the ministry, they told Priyanka and I that it would take 2 weeks for us to receive that permission letter. If we had gotten this letter any sooner, I believe that we could have finished that aspect of our project.

We find it very difficult to ask for help from our bosses since they either do not reply to our emails, are out of the country, or pass us off to someone else in the office that usually provide us with little help. Communication and efficiency has been quite poor with WaterAid which has made our job as researchers very difficult. To compensate for the exclusion of School Health and Nutrition Program from our project, we have decided to strengthen our interviews and information for the health facility side of the project. We have contacted more people for interviews and have found more articles and studies to strengthen the arguments made in our paper. We have tried to adapt our work style given these challenges. During the times we are waiting from replies from our bosses, Priyanka and I will try to interview more health professionals, make observations at the hospital, or continue writing the paper. We have tried to not let this setback stress us too much but it can be difficult to remain calm when our time here is short.