<p> This practicum sought to study whether the systematic creation of a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) at University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) would increase research staff confidence in their ability and improve knowledge of resources. We wished to determine also faculty confidence in research staff before and after SOP creation. The term SOP and its use came to prominence in the mid 20th century as a descriptor for a systematic method to ensure consistency and efficiency in task completion in organizations. An SOP is any document that seeks to standardize, through plain and instructive language, a common process or task in an organization to ensure the quality and uniformity of the outcome or product of said task or process. The DEM at UTSW was recently created as its own department when it split off from under the umbrella of the Department of Surgery and did not have any documented standardized processes in place regarding research administration actions and procedures. This could have been hindering the ability of the staff to operate efficiently, consistently, and correctly. For this project, the clinical research staff and faculty of the DEM of UTSW were surveyed regarding their confidence levels before and after a set of administrative SOPs was systematically developed to evaluate the success of the aforementioned SOPs. Before creating the SOPs, the staff and faculty were consulted on which SOPs they felt were most needed and, based upon the outcome of these consultations, creation of those SOPs was prioritized accordingly. Then, after looking at SOPs for similar or identical processes from other departments, they were collaboratively created with input and insights of research staff and faculty from these other departments. It was hypothesized that having SOPs would increase research staff confidence, increase efficiency, and increase accuracy in the completion of their duties, as well as increase faculty confidence in research staff. A statistical analysis of the seven pre-SOP research staff responses with six post-SOP research staff responses and 22 pre-SOP faculty responses with 15 post-SOP faculty responses yielded no significant associations. However, the mean response improved for all but one question of the faculty and research staff surveys. Considering the limitations of the present study, including a limited sample size and limited time window for completion, future studies with improved design are needed to further evaluate the impact of SOPs. But valuable, however, is the confirmation by the present study that involvement of personnel to whom SOPs apply is not only valuable and preferred, it is essential to ensuring that they are applicable and useful.</p><p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10980217 |
| Date | 06 December 2018 |
| Creators | Bailey, Luke |
| Publisher | University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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