Dean's Summer Students Project

Every year there are a handful of talented medical students working on a Dean’s Summer Students project, and this year is no different.

While they’re just getting started on collecting data and organizing their research, we’ve spoken to a pair of students about the work they’ll be doing.

Galilee Thompson, who has a degree in psychology, plans on looking at the correlation between patient outcomes and their pattern of relationships with other.

“I’ll be looking at the relationship between individual attachment styles and a patients’ attitude towards treatment,” she explained during a recent conversation about her research titled ‘Attachment style and the choice for treatment amongst psychiatric patients.’ “I’m looking specifically in populations with depression or anxiety disorders.

“And this is based on literature that finds that a patients psychiatric condition accounts a lot for outcomes such as morbidity and disability, but another factor is actually a patient’s willingness to comply with the treatment.”

The patients’ attachment style, continued Thompson, will then contribute to their overall relationship the care provider and affect their compliance during treatment.

A lot of the data Thompson will be using has already been compiled by her Dr. Adams’ team from work with patients who suffer from depression or anxiety disorders.

“I’m personally very interested in a more holistic approach to health,” Thomson explained regarding her choice of projects. “And I think examining something like a person’s attachment styles can matter – just seeing the person as a whole, and looking at all of the possible factors that could benefit them as a treatment.”

For Janessa Mann, choosing her project ‘The HIV Cascade of Care in Southern Saskatchewan - Gaps, Disparities, Successes, and Opportunities’, was made easier because she knew it would mean working with Dr. Alexander Wong, the principle investigator.

“I had the opportunity to shadow him before I got to medicine,” explained Mann, whose background is in biology. “So when I saw his project was one of the options for the Dean’s Project I got very excited because I knew Dr. Wong, and the area of infectious disease and HIV care is something that’s very interesting to me.

“HIV itself is very interesting because it’s one of those areas of infectious disease where you do have continuity of care, and you get to build relationships with your patients. Also there are many challenges to overcome in the areas of HIV prevention as well as treatment and support for HIV positive patients and many opportunities to advocate and hopefully make a difference.”

The Dean’s Project itself gives students this opportunity to gain experience, and provide some exposure to the research side of medicine, and can ultimately help them to decide on a specialty.

“I think the great thing about the Dean’s Project is that it allows you to explore different areas of medicine that interest you, and allows you to latch onto something that you might want to pursue,” Mann continued. “So hopefully that’s what this project will help me do - try to decide if this population of patients I’d like to devote myself to in the future.”