MPH 610 Week 5 Field Log Analysis Example

Field Log Analysis: What Four Weeks at the Kessler County Rabies Prevention Program Show About Where the Time Went, Against What the Work Plan Expected

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 610: Integrative Learning Experience (ILE) and Applied Practice Experience (APE) I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Field Log Analysis: What Four Weeks at the Kessler County Rabies Prevention Program Show About Where the Time Went, Against What the Work Plan Expected

What This Analysis Uses

This analysis draws on my own field log for the first four weeks at the county's animal bite and rabies desk. The log itself stays with me and the program and is not reproduced here. The figures below are grouped from it, and they are composite figures constructed for this course. The question is what the distribution of my time shows about the work and about my plan, and what should change for the remaining weeks.

Hours in Categories

I sorted every logged entry into five categories. Data work covers cleaning and analyzing the bite spreadsheet. Protocol work covers drafting and testing the consultation protocol. Meetings covers time with the manager, technician and emergency department staff. Shadowing covers time observing bite calls and follow-up. Waiting covers time when I could not proceed because access, data or a person was not available.

Table 1

Distribution of Logged Time Against the Work Plan

Note. Note. Shares of logged time, composite figures for this course; the work plan did not budget any waiting time.

The Gap Between Plan and Week

The largest gap is waiting, which the plan did not budget at all. Twelve percent of my time went to waiting: for the county's information technology office to remove names and addresses from the spreadsheet export, which took nine working days instead of two, and for the emergency department's nurse educator, whose first available meeting was in week 4 rather than week 3. The waiting came out of data work, which fell well below plan. Deliverable 1, the clean data set, was finished at the end of week 4 instead of week 3.

The gap tells me something about the site, not only about my schedule. Data that a program uses every day are not easy for an outsider to reach, because the county's rules on personal information apply even inside the department. Any future student or analyst working on this program will meet the same delay unless the program arranges a standing de-identified extract.

Two Episodes, Closely Read

The first episode was a bat call in week 2. A resident reported waking to find a bat in a child's bedroom. I listened as the technician advised the family; she was not sure whether a child who could not report a bite counted as an exposure and called the manager, who called the state. The answer came back in 40 minutes: a bat in a room with a sleeping child warrants consideration of prophylaxis, consistent with national recommendations, which treat bat contacts in this way because bites can go unnoticed (Rupprecht et al., 2010). That episode convinced me that the protocol's bat section must be the clearest on the page, because it is the situation where uncertainty is highest and delay matters most.

The second episode was a dog bite in week 3 where an emergency clinician called to ask whether to start prophylaxis. The dog was the patient's neighbor's, vaccinated and available for observation. The technician advised waiting for the 10-day observation, and the clinician agreed. Then the technician mentioned that a different clinician had started prophylaxis in a nearly identical case the month before. A study of emergency department exposures found that prophylaxis was judged unnecessary in two of every five courses started, frequently because the animal could have been watched instead (Moran et al., 2000). The protocol's dog and cat section needs to make the observation option easy to recommend.

What the Log Shows About Competencies

The log provides evidence for two competencies so far. Shadowing calls and testing the draft protocol against past calls are evidence for written communication, since the protocol is being revised against real situations. The single meeting with the nurse educator is the only evidence so far for interprofessional work, which my self-assessment rated as beginning; the log confirms that rating.

What Changes Next

Three changes follow. First, I will ask the manager to request a standing de-identified extract, refreshed monthly, so that the quarterly report does not depend on another nine-day wait. Second, I will move protocol testing with the emergency department to weeks 5 and 6, with a second meeting already booked, to make up for the late first meeting. Third, I will cut shadowing to one call session a week, since the episodes I needed for the protocol have been observed, and give the time back to data work for the quarterly report.

What the Log Does Not Show

The categories describe where time went, not how well it was used. An hour of data work that ends in a cleaning rule the manager can rerun is worth more than an hour spent fixing my own mistakes in the export, and the log does not separate them. It also records my time, not the site staff's; the technician spent about four hours across these weeks answering my questions and testing protocol drafts, which is a real cost to a program already near capacity. I have started noting the site's time alongside mine, so that the final portfolio can show what the experience cost the program as well as what it produced.

How the Remaining Weeks Will Be Measured

For the remaining four weeks, I will compare each week's distribution with a revised plan that budgets 5% for waiting. If waiting again exceeds 10%, I will raise it with the manager that week rather than at the end, since the quarterly report is the deliverable most exposed to further delay.

What the Site Staff Said About the Plan

At the end of week 4, I asked the technician and manager whether the work plan still matched what they needed. Both said the protocol mattered more than the report, because calls happen daily and the board meets quarterly. That confirms the decision to protect protocol testing time in weeks 5 and 6, even if the report's area analysis has to shrink.

References

Moran, G. J., Talan, D. A., Mower, W., Newdow, M., Ong, S., Nakase, J. Y., Pinner, R. W., & Childs, J. E. (2000). Appropriateness of rabies postexposure prophylaxis treatment for animal exposures. JAMA, 284(8), 1001-1007. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.284.8.1001

Rupprecht, C. E., Briggs, D., Brown, C. M., Franka, R., Katz, S. L., Kerr, H. D., Lett, S. M., Levis, R., Meltzer, M. I., Schaffner, W., & Cieslak, P. R. (2010). Use of a reduced (4-dose) vaccine schedule for postexposure prophylaxis to prevent human rabies: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. MMWR Recommendations and Reports, 59(RR-2), 1-9.