During this weekend I interviewed Alex, the second year student in DSI, who is working on health care area as his thesis topic. I decided to talk with him because I not only want to know more information about this area, but also hope to get some suggestions of the whole process of doing thesis.
But when I finished the interview I suddenly realised that the person I talk with should be someone I haven't known before, so I’m trying to get a contact with someone else now.
For my thesis, I think there might be two directions that I can focus on: health care and homelessness, both of them are my interested areas. For this semester in communication class, I’m working with a client providing Health Coach service to patients, which makes me have more opportunities to get to know this area, so I decide to pick this area to explore first.
Health Care is a huge system and each country, each city, each community even each hospital might be totally different in some specific area. How to narrow down my direction of the thesis is the biggest question I have in my mind. And also I want to know during the whole process of doing thesis, especially based on health care topic, what should I pay more attention to and what do I need to prepare from now?… I listed questions I had on my paper and began to contact with him.
His thesis is about helping patients who have language barriers to have better access to health services and care. He said health care is a very complicated system because there are a lot of audiences (patients, patient’s family members, doctors, nurses, health insurance company, etc.) being connected to each other and no problem exist independently. What we need to do is trying to know and understand the system you focusing on and talk to people to know their past experiences. There are a lot if people or organisations work hard to improve the health services and patients’ experiences, but we still can find the different kind of gaps in this huge system. At last he mentioned that what I need to always keep in mind is the users are not only the patients - patients’ family members, doctors, nurses… they all could be the users that we need to consider.
From this conversation, I get to know some information of health care system and the process of doing thesis in general The next step for me is trying to do research online to know more about this area and get in touch with some people who work in this area.