Virginia Research Day 2022

Medical Student Research Cl inical

16 Methodologic Challenges In Gathering Data Regarding The Beliefs About The COVID 19 Vaccination Among Staff From Long Term Care Facilities In Southwest Virginia During The SARS-COV-2 Pandemic

A. Wakeling; M. Marshall; L. Garvin; H.N. Rainey; S.J. Weir; D. Geiger; T.J. McCann Corresponding author: awakeling@vcom.edu

VCOM Virginia

numbers or addresses of facilities. We suspect facilities may have been understaffed and experiencing high staff turnover as evidenced by the administrator turnover we encountered while contacting facilities. If the facilities that accepted and posted our survey were understaffed, employees may have been less likely to spend time on additional ventures such as participating in research. Staffing issues and associated administrative burdens may have contributed to the lack of returned calls to voicemails we left. With multiple attempts at engaging with the facilities and minimal success, our project limitations aim to share the challenges of survey data collection during a pandemic and country wide staffing shortage. The methodologic challenges we faced may be unique to the time and workforce climate during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

be representative and generalizable. Reaching the administrator was the first bottleneck. Out of 84 facilities, we spoke directly to only 15 administrators. Other times, we left messages with support staff or were sent to the administrators’ voicemail without receiving a return call. We modified our approach by adding a mailed informational packet containing an explanation of the study and two copies of the English and Spanish versions of the flier. Of 84 informational packets mailed, 5 were returned (3 for incorrect address, 2 for change in administrators). In total, we contacted 84 facilities in Southwest Virginia, and received survey responses from 26 employees. We attribute some of the data collection challenges to the current conditions of the pandemic. There have been many changes to the healthcare workforce during the pandemic which may have affected data collection. We experienced challenges of reaching the workers at a facility due to changing administrators and incorrect public information regarding phone

Many factors contributed to methodologic issues in this study that sought to understand vaccine deliberation among employees of elderly care facilities because of their work with an elderly population vulnerable to adverse COVID-19 outcomes. The Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine located in Blacksburg, VA has an institutional mission to address rural disparities in healthcare which helped define our target area of interest - Southwest Virginia. The literature also suggested that vaccination precents in elderly residents were much higher than in workers/caregivers. This study was reviewed and approved by the VCOM Institutional Review Board (VCOM IRB #2021- 016), as were all modifications made along the way in recruitment. The study was designed to be easily accessible for participants and was formatted as a short survey that could be accessed via a QR code that we requested facility administrators to post for their staff. Many methodologic challenges were realized in trying to obtain a sample size that would

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