#m13internship

Before the summer holiday Molly and I had a brilliant idea. Mette who previously worked in the corporate world remembers back when life was stressful. Now as a yoga studio owner she would of course like to reach out to others that have not found the relaxing effects of yoga. A newer class she has recently started is Yoga Nidra. 

Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation that helps one relax so much that after a 20 minute session you feel as though you have slept 8 hours and your stress levels decrease, you are more productive the rest of your day and you feel fantastic. 

Who would not love to offer their employees this chance to recharge? Especially if they didn’t have to leave the work place? The idea was that Molly and I would contact potential business, come out to them and set up a trial service that would suit the business and employees.

So after gathering information on local businesses in Hellerup, we had a list potential “clients” we would contact. The phone calls were like this:

Me:

“Hi, this is Dawn and I am calling from Hot Yoga Hellerup. Can I talk to someone from your HR department?”

Them:

Then some talking back and forth, but not really ever getting the word in about Yoga Nidra and reducing stress.  Some said we already similar services, send me an email instead, we don’t have the resources for this, but the most common responds was. “We are too busy at the moment to consider anything right now, please contact us later – like in the fall”.

This of course was frustrating and also demotivating. The only thing I could do was laugh at this ironic situation, we are offering something that we feel will reduce their stress and they use their stress as an excuse not to hear.  

After a few calls I asked the receptionist to be forwarded to their HR department or someone that is in charge of the employees wellness and she brighten up and said, oh please I do hope that you can figure out something, it is much needed here.

This reminds me about health communication and what we have learned in our GNH studies. An ongoing issue with being a GNH’er is how we deliver our health promoting messages to the public so that they will stop up and hear us?

 An obvious situation is to not just go in cold and drop it, somehow you have to warm up to them. Perhaps reach out to the ones that have some interest. A bottom up approach, rather than top down (yeah that is a reoccurring theme) works best.

For example the receptionist, perhaps we could approach her with a prospect and then she goes to the HR department with a request and then interest from the HR department would blossom from there.

The people around me are all very engaged and eager about their field - they all seem to be experts on their area! They all possess skills within teamwork and multidisciplinary working approaches, which is very inspiring and much in line with my own study program. Another dominant skill they possess is the ability to work independently and do all sorts of “mini-researches” to keep up with the newest updates and initiating new projects. Due to the limit resources, they seem to put a lot of personal time in their work and are very flexible with their working hours. This is a very inspiring skill and working style and really shows how much of their own personality they put into their job.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, Suzi is the project manager of the Fabric Source Library and a key person within the Nordic project, NICE. Rikke and I found it therefore very interesting to conduct an interview with her in order to get her personal and hands-on experience of the library and project.

We spend some time on developing the interview guide, which was approved by Suzi prior to our interview date. After the interview, we transcribed and got the following main points from Suzi:

The main challenges were the minimum requirements for the suppliers, in terms of price and set-up cost.

DAFI is merely a facilitating actor between suppliers and buyers - it is therefore not DAFIs responsibility to ensure that factories live up to the standards they claim.

The general feedback from the textile industry was positive and many brands were interested in converting into a greener production. Approximately 2.200 brands visited the library and many are continuous users of the library and advancing in sustainable production

This internship has ended for now, and the writings of the bachelor thesis are beginning to unfold. It has been a pleasant and giving internship, once again, at Nordic Laboratories. I have learned a great deal of new things, and developed my skills. 

I did not get to do interviews and movies for a number of reasons, however, I tried include the reader as much as possible in explanatory texts and pictures. 

Overall, I appreciate this experience, and I look forward to see what the future will bring.   

Finally, below are a few pictures I’d like to share. 

From the dietician’s office where she has consultations with clients. 

Above is just a sneak peak of the final product from I’ve constructed to the webinar we did (see previous blog post). This is just a trial print. The plan is that these are printed to brochures. 

In one of my first blog posts on this internship I wrote a short introduction to my BA thesis ideas:

“My BA thesis will deal with the diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and potential intervention strategies and tools for comprehending this condition, which is expressed with multi-faceted symptoms. During my internship I will have the chance to do some data collection in the form of interviews and questionaires with clients and practitioners connected to the intership place. Thereby it can potentially give the opportunity for including some follow-up on the same subjects during my BA writing. Futhermore I can gather information and knowledge on the topic, and consider some potential functional aspects as tools in treating and guiding the treatment. The approach and investigation will include both nutritional and clinical aspects as well as psychological/sociological aspects. During the interviews and other practices when gathering data, I will consider some psychological aspects in how patient care is handled, and how patients are receiving information and guidance.”

In light of the above introduction to my initial thoughts of my BA thesis, this itself gives a few internship based study issues relevant for both my GNH education as well as my BA thesis. 

As my topic will be dealing with IBS and symptom relief (and thereby increase in health-related quality of life) in connection with dietary interventions, this is my first study issue to explore. The dietary intervention of concern will mostly consider the diet called Low FODMAP Diet, and its potential effects on IBS symptoms. Furthermore, I will try to go identify how symptoms of IBS can be investigated in order to target interventions more precisely with efficient outcomes. The primary focus on symptom relief would be quality of life. Secondary focus would be compliance to treatment, and entitled in this is communication and presentation of an intervention from health practitioner to patient. Additionally self-efficacy and other psychological aspects/theories of compliance/motivation is relevant assessing. If possible, I will aim for presenting 1-2 cases from data collection, and, if possible, include a follow-up.

So far - and in short - I consider my BA thesis objective as follows:

Investigating dietary influences, changes and interventions effect on the quality of life in IBS patients, as well as the communication and psychology around this. Additionally investigating specific tools to identify more specific gastrointestinal imbalances when diagnosing IBS, and how these could potentially help guide and target the intervention for more efficient outcomes.

One thing may be the learning objectives and goals you set initially according to ideas you have about how an internship experience is going to unfold. Sometimes these agree to how reality integrates with the project, and other times it takes you down other roads. Either or is not necessarily a good or bad thing, rather the important thing is what you make of it and how you choose to use these happenings to your further development.

As I recall my learning objectives and the key strategies to achieve these, I actually still think the objectives are maintained and still stand as guidelines to what I am actually doing during this internship. Of course there are things that was not outlined beforehand, but that is only good and as it should be! That gives me the opportunity to explore how real life offers you challenges not expected. It also gives me further challenges in how GNH theories THEN applies to this internship, because certain happenings may for example be expressed right in-between two theories. That in itself proofs the theory of most theories; there are always exceptions to the rules. 

Most of my learning objectives are covered to a smaller or greater extend in the tasks Im provided. The topics may then be more diverse than I initially thought, but I dont see this a bad thing, rather an opportunity to learn even more broadly. I still see these things and actual tasks fitting well with my BA thesis objectives, and also with my first GNH internship, where I actually completed some written patient hand-out material on specific therapeutic diets I am exploring in connection with my BA thesis on IBS. One of the coming weeks I am gathering data for my BA thesis in observing consultations with my target group of patients as well as identifying one or two patients to interview - hopefully with the chance to do a follow-up with them during the writing of my BA thesis. 

Applying theories from GNH to solve learning objectives?

Especially fundamental biochemical, physiological and nutritional knowledge are important in my work here. Further, theories of physiology and motivational strategies certainly have their space to fulfill as well. Theories of self-efficacy and motivation towards why action towards better health are much relevant, however of this specific patient group, many patients are already very motivated by their health challenge itself, due to its comprehensiveness and clear interference with their well-being. Elements of coaching and cutting-to-the-core is relevant in getting as much out of relatively short client sessions. Especially the issue of quality of life becomes relevant to my own experience and work here, as well as for my BA thesis. I see the quality of life as a general, over-all motivation for exploring and helping people towards better health. Going through these things also serves as a natural eye-opener in some ways towards my own health, which brings up theories of educational philosophy and relevance - theories of how relevant specific issues are to a person can be viewed exponentially with how related this person feels this specific issue, i.e. how relevant this issue is, and how “needed” it is to obtain understanding of it.

Theories obtained from GNH are integrated with experience and personal frameworks, and serve as a synergistic foundation for my further development. 

At the end of the day, I think much of my learning objectives, directions and sometimes detours during this learning and development are reflections of reality comply with my interests. In other words how realistic is it that I can work with these things that I feel passionated about? So far I think it seems quite realistic. Experience and constant reality-checks will ensure adjustments to learning objectives along the way - not only for internships but also throughout a professional career. 

I would like to emphasize the process as much as the learning goals - the process is obviously where I learn the most.

As you may have noticed from my blog posts, my work at this internship place includes a lot of research, both online and in paper form. Much time is spent with reading scientific articles and other relevant papers and books connected to the different topics. It stretches from both plain physiological and biological levels to more clinical interpretations, and how such knowledge can be used in practice. So I see this as comprehensive walk-through and education of the topics of concern, since it needs to be taken from a theoretical level to a more practical level. Further, researching becomes even more comprehensive as it is not only about finding official and conventional conclusions - rather it is finding these and digging deeper into topics, comparing such findings with other potential approaches. A good example is looking at cardiovascular diseases; what are the conventional approaches and how are these established? In addition to this, research may include understanding other, more integrative approaches to cardiovascular health, how these are established and what the practical management tells us about the theories behind. Often in clinical work you find that what works in theory does not always translate into practice. One of the reasons is humanity, and that we do not always fit into boxes, and also the fact that we are nowhere near understanding all the biological and biochemical processes we as humans possess. 

This brings me to a bit reflection on which people I see around me during this internship. First, I see very dedicated and talented people. People, who are willing to go a bit beyond what may have been their first impression and dig deeper from there. The practitioners are people who - of course - work closely on personal levels with other people. They need to cross certain personal borders to be able to provide the assistance these patients seek. This requires great skills of sympathy and empathy, and being able to interpret when the timing of doing a certain intervention is right. I dont always think that this is skills you learn, I think you need to have a natural insight beforehand to develop these skill sets. I see people who are passionate about their work, who continuously strive to seek new knowledge and new insights, and cross country borders to obtain this knowledge and expand their understandings. Experience is another key-word I find extremely important in this health field, and especially the clinical experience in being able to recognize certain patterns of human behaviors in terms of psychological and mental mechanisms. Experience comes with practice and time, and I see these people putting many hours of work into maintenance of already established work fields, as well as improvement in many ways. I also see people who do not only see this as their work - but also as a hobby, an interest, which may expand throughout the working hours. This may mean that there are certain things you want to explore and read about in your spare time - out of complete free will and plain interest. 

Patients contacting such clinic as this have often been through years of challenges with the conventional medical system, and has been met with the, at times, narrowed approaches to treatment of chronic diseases. “Holistic” is not a word of great recognition within the established medical field, however these patients are often clear evidence that a symptomatic treatment approach is not always what makes people healthier (if ever).