returning to Pharma Medica to do another study. here is why

[beatman]

Next week Saturday I will do another study with them.   I am going back their because i emailed [e-mail] and tell them the exact problems i explain my bad experience in the pharma medica thread. I got a call from a man at the clinic and told him abut the staff refusing to change the channel which is stuck on a sports channel ignoring my and other people's request to change it..  I also told him about the slow internet service.  he said he will talk to the nurses/staff and since i told him the study number he can track down the staff that helped with the study i was in.




Next Week Saturday when i go to start volunteering. i will post updates. during the weekend and the other weekend when i stay at the clinic.


next week Saturday i will ask the nurses if we are going to be forced to watch one channel  and ignore our requests to change it to soing entertaining while telling them my previous experience in December when I was there. i will post updates on their reactions  and reasons if they refuse to change the channel. so next week i will check the tv listings to see what movies i would want to watch during my stay. I will also download music to listen to just in case their internet is slow and unreliable to the point that you cannot watch youtube videos, i will also bring a couple movie dvds if they ignore requests to change the channel.

stay tune to this thread. as i post my experience during my stay in their next study. if their internet is still slow and unreliable. i may not be able to post a lot of updates.  so i will post updates on monday. and the monday the other week after my second weekend stay.

[vark]

You may have been contacted by Mohammed. He is a Vice president of the canadian company that owns pharmamedica and is one of the two people who runs the St. Charles place. I like him a lot. He is gregarious and his culture, from morocco, places a high value on hospitality, so he wants you to feel welcome. A thing to know about him is he overpromises and underdelivers. maybe 1/3 iof the time he delivers. The other guy, the asian doctor whose name i'm spacing on right now, is very quiet and stern and will never promise you anything, but I have a feeling if he did promise you soing he would deliver, but you might not like it.
I will also return to Pharmamedica, i've learned to make a certain peace with it, but i'm very unhappy there, for the same reasons, the crowding and the noise and the lack of staff accountability. I hate the tv. I dislike that the troublemakers are allowed to get away with everything. I was recently at a place and a guy got mouthy with staff and they sent him home that day and put up signs saying follow staff instructions or get banned. At pharma both subjects and staff are mouthy and loud and unprofessional and it makes it hard for me to come in and get work done and get sleep.
A problem at pharmamedica is that the staff is overly compartmentalized. "I'm trained in how to draw blood. I'm not trained in how to walk over to the clinic next door and hit the reset button on the router." Literally the reason the wifi is so bad is that you can't get a staff member to go around and do a daily reset of the routers, which involves standing on a chair and pushing the button with a pen or soing like that, and making sure the 16 year old computers on the desks are plugged in and have had the passwords entered. somebody should put a sticky note with the password on it. Mohammed ends up doing it, he's good with IT, but you shouldn't have to rely on the company VP to do the daily IT tasks, all the staff should be crosstrained, with checklists. As a subject, the most important things to my comfort are that it's not too hot or cold, that there's an unlocked bathroom, that's it's quiet, and that the wifi works. Ok,and safety, that there's not some felon gangbanger in the bunk next to me.

The second week of my last three week study there i went and got earplugs, but they ended up pushing earwax into my ears so now i am partially deaf. I tried ear drops and gen peroxcide and that didn't work so i went to a clinic and spent $100 to get my ears cleaned but it still didnt work,and it's been a month now. That's just one of my many reasons for being a little hostile to pharmamedica. And that's a place i'll still go back to, some places are worse. The third week I got headphones, but not the noisecancelling ones I still want to get.
They could make life much much better there by setting the tv to closed caption and turning the sound off. There is no reason I should have to be partially deaf right now because of their lack of consideration. If they want subjects to be forced to watch tv, they should run that by the irb and the sponsor and put it in the consent agreement.

please dont watch youtube videos. if one or two people are watching videos, that ties up all the bandwidth for everyone else. there's enough bandwidth to run all text applications, like this board for example, quickly, as long as people don't tie it up with videos, gaming, porn, etc.

I recently screened somewhere and the topic of pharmamedica came up. Several people, no one i knew, said they'd done one study there and wouldn't go back. I heard words like "filthy" "cramped" "rude staff" "untrained".

This place is an example of gresham's law, "the bad drives out the good." the conditions are substandard, so they attract subjects willing to put up with substandard conditions. these may be substandard subjects, who can create a hostile environment for better subjects.
they could easily fix that if they wanted to by having a two tier system with professional types in one clinic and party types in another,
but in the short term that might seem to complicated for them, so they keep putting their long term business investment at risk.

[beatman]

Today i get 5 movie dvds from the local library.

here what they website says

[What will I do while staying at the clinic?
Our clinic has a state-of-the-art entertainment system including 52-inch LCD televisions, surround sound, and PlayStation3 consoles. With over 200
channels, a DVD collection, and an assortment of PlayStation3 games, we hope to make your stay at our clinic as enjoyable as possible.]


i will mention this on their website if they refuse volunteer requests to change the channel

[beatman]

25 hours to go to see if they will force volunteers to watch one channel and ignoring request to change to a channel with movies and tv shows

[beatman]

i am at the clinic . i did the medical screening, call for the results assign a number and told to check in today at 11am. it is about an asthma medication which involves inhaling. i passed the practice tests. everything as all good until i am placed in stand by. this means if somebody fail during the dosing which is very unlikely. i may take part in the study. i might leave the clinic tommorow. this is a waste of my time.

[antecubital]

Mar 5, 2016 17:19:11 GMT -5 beatman said:

i am at the clinic . i did the medical screening, call for the results assign a number and told to check in today at 11am. it is about an asthma medication which involves inhaling. i passed the practice tests. everything as all good until i am placed in stand by. this means if somebody fail during the dosing which is very unlikely. i may take part in the study. i might leave the clinic tommorow. this is a waste of my time.

Just a reality check: There no guarantees. It's always a gamble.

[beatman]

the good news is the wi fi is faster than when i stayed last December. the tv was on a lifetime or a life time movie channel that was showing a movie when are arrived. the tv is now tuned to A and E.

[beatman]

more good news.

i was on stand by because the people who want to do the study wanted 30 people my number is above 30 so i am at priority to do another weekend study starting nextweek so i have to do a pre-screening again for that study

[beatman]

tonight i will be checking in and leave Sunday morning. i will check in again for part 2 in the last weekend of April

[vark]

I was there yesterday and the day before as an alternate. They are doing this thing now of bringing in way too many people (15 extras, keeping 32) so the extra get a priority for the next study. So the study fills up with people who already have a priority, so if you are the new guy unless you get lucky you will have to come be an alternate in to be able to actually get in one later. This is no problem for the local guys, but it screws over the people who come from out of town and lose money on such trips. The $100 alternate pay is way less than i spent for screening and checking in and going back home, also this means no paying work in march. I am now signed up to screen for a $5k in april/may, but i would rather have done this $4K in march/april. This was my backup plan after spaulding pushed back a small march study. so now i have 3 screenings lined up for april, and could still end up staying on track for my goals for the year, but it's always frustrating to lose a whole month. This, by the way, was a study i screened for on the first day, when it was not even posted on the website. Pharmamedica has joined the ranks of places like vince and jasper where you cant trust what they put up on the site, you either have to call every day or know somebody. I knew somebody. So it is rigged against you two ways -
first they dont tell you about the studies they really have, and second there's the whole alternate priority scam. And they have ads on the buses in the hood in st louis, so there is a constant flow of new people. This is still a regular gig for me, i'm willing to do the alternate routine, but i wanted to give you guys an update. I've been critical of this place before, and now it's gotten a bit worse,
but i dont have a lot of options.

I'm going to have to sit down and catch up my expense log. Screening and checking in 250 miles x 4 = 1000 miles x 50 cents a mile = $500 plus 2 nights away from home 2 x $50. so $600 in imputed expenses to write off against my actual income of $100. Keeping track as I go along makes it easier to do my taxes at the end of the year. I need to get a little better of keeping a running total. I should also be keeping a different set of books where I enter my actual expenses instead of imputed ones.
For this trip I had gas $35 groceries from an asian market $50 goodwill $12 indian buffet $10 coffee $1 so $108. This is my first trip in a car I spent $700 on, it looks like it's going to be a good cheap car for doing studies in. Oh and I spent $30 on noise cancelling headphones. At Pharmamedica you need them.

[beatman]

So i checked in last night and i am in the clinic. they spit us in 2 groups. subjects numbers 1-27 in one clinic and 28-54 in the other clinic. i am in the 1-27 one.the tv was on news channel this morning and then switched to a movie channel. the internet is faster this month than in december. youtube, netfix work and internet radio works fairly well. in the other clinic 28-54 their tv is on sports all day. the only bad thing is in most cases you don't get to sit near a wall socket if your laptop battery only lasts 2 hours or less. apps like tune in used to listen to internet radio drains my smartphone battery. i was lucky i have over 3 days of mp3 music on my smartphone. my laptop battery last one hour so i am thinking of ing a new laptop battery that lasts hours. throughout the day the reading room, the bunker rooms and the recreation room with the PS3 and the wired desktop are all locked. in 1-27 clinic those rooms will be at 6pm. radio signals in the clinic is poor. on the fm band the only stations i get are those that use the CN Tower to transmit thier signal . on the am band you can only get signals in the bunker rooms if you put the radio on the window ledge you get 680 news radio and fairchild radio 1430. am radio signals were stronger in the other clinic where i stayed in december.

[unclepaul]

I was in the Toronto clinic a few weeks ago for a lowly $1k study as standby (didn't get in). They told me as soon as I walked out of the clinic I could wait in the lobby and do a screening for another study if there was any. Well I'm not sure what the worker that told me that was smoking because the receptionist at the lobby told me they weren't screening for anything. I double checked their website and sure enough they had zero studies listed.

Beatman, I think the reason why wifi was much better than December is because the place is going through a drought in studies this year. In days gone by over 50% of the clinics (I think they have 6 total from what I've seen) would be busy with studies. That is a lot of subjects using wifi. I too noticed good wifi when I was there a few weeks ago. But then again we were the only study being conducted. The rest of the building was a ghost town.

[beatman]

i am going to do medical for another weekend study. time get more MP3s because it is likley i will not be sitting close to a wall socket . my laptop battery last for 1 hour.

[vark]

at the shopping center at zumbehl rd just north of 1-70, the one with a save a lot and a movie theater, i was able to a laptop battery cheap. i'd already gone over to walmart and bought a $200 laptop which has good battery life, essential for pharmamedica. try to smuggle in a power strip. they dont like them but they come in really handy there. other things to bring there: thermometer, good headphones.

edit: it's possible you meant the toronto location and not st charles in which case never mind

[puntkicker]

This talk of needing to fail once to be able to get in later makes me wonder if I should invest $400(total) on 2 trips for a study I couldn't do anyhow, due to having another screening for a study I prefer coming up? I mean if I knew for certain I would be an alternate, I think it would be well worth it instead of being the usual letdown, if one needs a VIP card to get in. I wish more folks would share their thoughts on these things. Lately I've been consumed by thinking about study-related things, being it's still somewhat new to me. I realize some of my thinking is atypical, possibly even for a labrat, so I am looking for any feedback I can get. Thanks