Research Associate: Communication Skills Training Project

Aga Khan University in collaboration with the Brigham and Women's Hospital, plans on developing a novel curriculum, designed to improve the Communication and Inter-personal Skills of training physicians, currently enrolled in the Post-Graduate Medical Education (PGME) programme.

Numerous studies have endorsed the intrinsic association of better interpersonal, communication skills and professional behavior of health- care providers with improvement in health-care outcomes and quality. Hence, our study will focus on identifying the existing problems of communication skills exhibited by training physicians across various sub-specialties in the Aga Khan University. This will be done through a series of qualitative in-depth interviews with faculty, residents, fellows, nursing staff and medical students to develop a robust understanding of the current status of the problem. This will be followed by a symposium of educational experts to help strategise and devise a curriculum, which will be incorporated in the training programme.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for:

• assisting the research team in piloting, testing and refining data collection instruments for this project
• coordinating communication between the research team and other stakeholders for meetings collecting data from respondents using an array of qualitative and quantitative research techniques
• maintaining accurate records, questionnaires and safeguarding the confidentiality of subjects
• assisting in the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data
• monitoring progress of research projects
• ensuring smooth and efficient day-to-day operations of data collection activities and qualitative interviews
• assisting the project manager and research associates in preparing manuscripts and abstracts for publications and presentations as required by investigators, administrators and funding agencies
• assisting the research team in administering surveys as a part of this project, carrying out qualitative interviews of volunteers across the medical college, and presenting findings from the preliminary analysis in weekly research meetings.

Requirements

You should have:

• a bachelor's degree in the field of Biological Science or related field of research
• preferably two to three years of relevant experience
• proven mixed-methods research skills
• excellent interpersonal skills particularly communication skills, with command over local languages and English.
• good command on computer applications, particularly MS Office package.
• relevant experience with using data collection soft-wares like SPSS or STATA.