ATHP: Research Institute Meeting 2

The Addiction Training for Health Professionals (ATHP) Research Institute meeting continues its focus on presenting research proposals by the Addiction Concentration Trainees enrolled at Public Health U (PHU). We are also using this platform to present ongoing research projects at our institution, including the research conducted by our Innovations Team.

Dr. Korbe Alfred is an Internal Medicine Resident in Yekatit who cares for patients with mental health or addiction issues. He presented his topic of interest for his research proposal, which focuses on substance use amongst persons living with HIV in South Sudan. His interest is primarily centered on patients being treated at the main hospital in the capital city. So far, Alfred has noted that the data shows an increased instance of substance misuse among these patients. He intends to investigate further the types of substances common among people living with HIV and how this can impact ERT response. The members of the research meeting also suggested that he investigate the literacy rate levels, the stigmatization of HIV patients, and how it may drive mental health issues in this area. This study will most likely be presented as an intersectional study, using qualitative and quantitative methods to obtain data. 

 

Dr. Bob Kagoro is a medical officer in primary healthcare. Like Dr. Alfred, he also cares for mental health or addiction patients. In providing an update on his research proposal, he mentioned that he is currently working on narrowing his topic as he is mainly interested in investigating the role of alcohol abuse on gender-based violence and interventions of treatment in the emergency department. His concern is that there is not much data available on this topic at the national level, making it even more significant to investigate the prevalence of alcohol use disorders and their correlation to domestic violence. These findings will allow for developing planning interventions and distributing resources to help mitigate the issue.

 

The ATHP Research Team offered many suggestions to Dr. Kagoro to aid in his research. Dr. Villalba suggested investigating the specific problem at each level of the healthcare system if he would like to obtain a more comprehensive overview of the issue. Dr. Frank also suggested using a similar approach and narrowing down the research using a comparative approach. For example, a sample of emergency room patients used with the total number of victims of domestic violence being used as the denominator. Miriam Chickering indicated that there are many opportunities for funding for issues related to gender-based violence that Dr. Kagoro can apply for to obtain assistance for his research, especially since he is aiming for an intervention-based approach.

The Innovations Team at NextGenU.org (NGU) was allowed to present its research on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the instructional design (ID) process at NextGenU.org. GPT-3 is a general-purpose, autoregressive language model trained on a wide set of real texts to continue any given textual prompt (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020). It is trained to predict the conditional probabilities over possible continuations of the text, given the text that went before it. The Innovations Team wishes to investigate further how GPT-3 can be used in the creation process of multiple choice questions (MCQs). This pertains to the alignment of student learning outcomes (SLOs) with the question, using appropriate content from the learning resources (LRs), the creation of accurate answers, and feasible distractors. Other areas of the instructional design process that will be tested using GPT-3 include drafting learning activities, case studies, and course outlines. The versatility of this tool also allows our team to utilize GPT-3 for administrative, research, and promotional tasks such as drafting emails, developing blog posts, creating captions, and much more. 

Feedback will be obtained from the team on their use of the tool, along with suggestions for further improvements. Once approved, this will then be utilized as much as possible in our daily tasks to continue producing learning materials for our global audience efficiently.

Samantha Baboolal

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