Meet our Study Team Member, April Hoge!

Hello April, tell us about yourself!

I’m the project coordinator for CSI:OPIOIDs – this means that I oversee all aspects of the study ranging from administrative tasks like ethical review with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and contracting to data and analytical tasks like conducting interviews and taking part in qualitative analyses.

What is your professional background or personal connection to this work. Why are you interested in this study?

I’ve worked in Research at the VA for 7 years. The studies I’ve worked on have focused on several different topic areas such as homelessness, quality care experiences among Veterans with homeless experience, and care changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve always loved working with Veterans, in college I worked with a local nonprofit called Three Hots and a Cot.

I would go to my nearest Three Hots and a Cot house each week to talk to the folks there and update their resource guide which provided contact information on local organizations that can assist with medical needs, job skills, and general resource connectors. Since that experience, I’ve known that I would like to build a career focused on supporting those who have served our country through military service.

There are 2 special things about CSI:OPIOIDs that drew me to it: 1. The opportunity to collect completely new data on a serious problem facing our country and 2. The opportunity to potentially inform change both within and outside of the VA. Though the purpose of the study is not to inform policy, I do believe collecting these narratives of individual’s pain and care journeys and noting the personal and systems-level factors present in these stories will finally elucidate the trends we’re seeing in quantitative research.

What has been the most interesting/surprising/meaningful thing about doing this work, so far?

Right off the bat, the most meaningful part of this work has been lending an ear to participants telling us about their loss.

Obviously the goal of the study is to build a narrative structure for pre-existing statistical work in this field and identify themes that surround these deaths, but I am proud to offer even a small amount of comfort to individuals who have lost loved ones this way.

This is a difficult topic to talk about – much less to complete a full interview on – and I have been so grateful to have the opportunity to talk with our participants and let them know that we care about these stories.

What do you think people in our society might need to learn at this time about pain and its care?

I am not a clinician, but my number one takeaway is that healthcare and medicine are truly individual and often times governmental oversight of medication and broad-strokes policies can be very harmful.

Doctors need to feel safe and secure in their provision of treatment and patients need to have shared decision making in regards to their personal care. Chronic pain is an incredibly complex issue and even at the individual-level a perfect answer probably won’t exist, but sweeping guidelines that fully restrict access to different lines of care are less likely to help patients find effective treatment.