AMPDS Data

The research protocol that I sent to EMAS was scrutinised by the party who's going to authorise the research. One of the issue that they had was the human resource implications. Understandably, they don't want to put undue pressure and demand on their staff. So, I had to explicitly clarify the amount of involvement of EMAS staff in my research.

One thing that I wanted to do was analysing 999 calls where ECPs were dispatched. The data comes from the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatching System (AMPDS). Upon a discussion with the EMAS people, I had to downsize the requested amount of data from 3 months to 1 month. They thought that it would take a lot of time to get the data, as its size is huge. Fair enough. I don't have an insider knowledge of the database. I don't know the population size from which I'm sampling. Nor do I know how the database is configured. I had imagined it being fairly robust that any queries can be made using a set of clicks or command line. But, who am I to say that.

At the same time that I'm processing the research proposal authorisation, I contacted my ECP mates about the data. One guy forwarded my request to someone in EMAS. Imagine my delight when this person (lets call him Greg)emailed me a data request form. It seemed that all I have to do was fill up the form, and I can get my data soon. I know that I don't need an ethics approval to do studies on the AMPDS data because there's a similar study reported in Emergency Medicine Journal. So, I was very hopeful that I don't have to wait for the research authorisation to get through to get my hands dirty on the AMPDS data.

After 3 days since the initial contact with Greg, I got 6 month worth of AMPDS data. Yeay! That's much more than my initial request. So much better. It didn't took a long time to pull up the data. I'm relieved. And very much happy. So, data for the first phase of my research is in hand. Time to do some analysing. And I can see another journal article coming up soon. 

Alhamdulillah.