Hello! My name is Claire, and I am currently finishing up my first year at FSU. It is hard to believe that this year has gone by so fast. To me, it feels like my first home game in the student’s section was just a few weeks ago! I have really enjoyed my experience at FSU so far, and I am thrilled to work on an IDEA Grant project this summer. I have been working behind-the-scenes on coordinating this project since December, so it is exciting to see things coming together.
For my project, I am partnering with a community organization that is near and dear to my heart — Shepherd’s Hope, a free medical clinic for uninsured, low-income patients in the Orlando area. The clinic does important work for the Central Florida community, and I am lucky enough to be a part of its amazing volunteer team. Every year, Shepherd’s Hope helps thousands of people get the care they need. With such high demand for services, wait times can sometimes be lengthy. It is not uncommon for patients to start lining up outside the Downtown Clinic’s doors hours before it opens, and patients can end up waiting several hours for care. Because of the clinic’s limited resources, shortening wait times is not necessarily possible. But we can work to find other ways to improve the waiting room experience for patients.
If I have learned one thing through my time as a volunteer at Shepherd’s Hope, it is that limited resources call for creative solutions. In this case, a potential solution came from an unexpected place — the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Roundtable. Through UROP, l was able to learn about the research of Dr. Adam Hanley and become a mentee in his lab at the Brain Science and Symptom Management Center. Part of Dr. Hanley’s research is studying how brief mindfulness interventions can be implemented in clinic waiting rooms to reduce pain and anxiety.
After reading literature on the efficacy of such interventions and seeing firsthand how they positively affected patients at an orthopedic clinic, I wondered whether these mindfulness interventions could help Shepherd’s Hope. Connecting the free clinic with Dr. Hanley’s research could not only make the waiting room experience more productive and peaceful for patients, but it would also allow for the lab to address a current gap in research by collecting data on the efficacy of brief mindfulness interventions in a low-income, uninsured, and multilingual patient population. It seemed like a win-win situation for everyone involved. I reached out to the clinic staff at Shepherd’s Hope, and the rest is history.
Fast-forward four months later, and it is now almost time to launch this project. Supplies are starting to be purchased, and — with the help of the incredible people at Shepherd’s Hope — we have assembled a dedicated team of volunteer research assistants to aid in data collection. I am truly so excited to be bringing this project to Shepherd’s Hope, and I am looking forward to sharing our progress in the next blog post.
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