It has been such a good experience this semester to be a part of what the 1917 Clinic is doing to provide quality care to people living with HIV and AIDS. As I am now at the end of this project, I find that I am more prepared for my career as a nurse and for the challenges that I will face in this field. My ability to communicate with and care for people has been expanded and I have learned to see people first and foremost not as a diagnosis, but as individual people that I have the ability to influence.
This last post will be short and sweet. As I mentioned in my last post, approximately 50% of the women that I contacted actually came in and received their pap smears. In one six week period, I called 68 women and 33 received their exams. It has been difficult to determine exactly what this data means (if the phone calls have been helping or not) because this is the first time that Truus and others at the clinic have kept statistics about phone calls. This said, the information that I have collected will be a baseline for future studies of the effect of phone calls on patient adherence to the recommended cervical cancer screenings. What I can say is it’s possible that some of those 33 women that came in for pap smears might not have were it not for the phone calls.
