My DNP project involves an initial invitation sent via newsletter to all staff and faculty of FHSU.  The announcement has run for two weeks with little feedback for participation. The Tiger Daily newsletter has been inundated with information for the university being the first few weeks of school.  Many announcements for back to school activities have been printed in the same newsletter and the team believes that the lack of interest in my project thus far is due to the overwhelming of information to all staff and faculty concerning all back to school events.  My concern is that the participation rate will be too low to achieve accurate results for my project.

I conducted a project kick off meeting with many members of the team including the faculty content specialist and it was suggested that we increase the announcement frequency to daily and that we place flyers in key locations to coincide with announcing the activities throughout the wellness project.  After learning the IRB revision process (which took me a couple of days to get correct), the revisions were approved and the team notified of the approved schedule and flyers.

Another obstacle in these first few weeks was the fact that I had undergraduate students signed up to participate in measurement day 1 and all students were scheduled to be off campus at a facility tour for clinicals.  There were a handful of volunteers but not all time slots were committed.

One last obstacle for the project was that the day of measurements, it downpoured rain.  So the project was set up to encourage increasing physical activity and the participants had to try to decide if they were going to walk in the rain to weigh in or if they were going to struggle to find parking in the university parking lot.

It’s definitely been obstacles I hadn’t considered.  I have grown in my ability to follow up and to communicate with my team and I’m learning a lot about IRB.  It’s been a great learning experience so far.