arbi  
stripcreator donor

arbi says:

my review of ths place: I am there now. 2 12 day periods for $4k. i'll add details to the post later, it's bedtime now. bad food but you don't have to eat it. not unusually bad, just hospital type food. lots of the old staff has come back. this place was built to do large weekend studies and it's not well set up for long stays. 20 guys in bunk beds in this room. 40 people in one big room for 10 days. claustrophobic. put lab rats under stress in too small a place and they tend to get violent. hard chairs. blaring tv. newly reopened, out of town management, things are confused. 80 % black, 70% male. it's a bit like the morgantown place. not as bad as arkansas research which closed.they seem to have lost the local students who used to come here. some people got burned when pracs went bankrupt leaving people unpaid, so they are having trouble filling group 2 of this study. naltrexone, 1 shower in 7 days, this not an easy study. no clocks, no posted schedule, it's haphazard. but $4K is motivating everybody to try to follow the rules and get along. not that there are many rules. we wear tshirts with our study numbers on them, which works pretty well. i was able to find a little room off to the side that i commandeered as my office so i have a quiet place to get my work done, otherwise i'd be going crazy from the noise and drama. it's kind of a vicious circle where conditions are bad, so they get the most desperate or hardened study-goers, so conditions get worse. at the buffalo clinic, the tvs are silent and you wear headphones to listen to them. that kind of a setup would be an easy fix to hugely improve things here, but i doubt anyone cares. another issue is the lack of outlets. there are none in the bunk room, a few along the edges of the big room, but none near our desks. luckily this computer has a decent battery. no lockers or anywhere to put your stuff except on your bunk. no washing machines. so if they wanted to make things better, they could open another bunk room so we wouldn't be stuck on top bunks, get better chairs, more outlets, set the tv to closed caption, get lockers and washing machine, and institute some behavioral standards. but i don't expect to see any of this happen. bathrooms are locked at arbitrary times for no explained reason. that's usually a sign of a place that doesn't give a damn about subjects. they don't recycle, another clue that they lack a basic social conscience. after another group checked in, the internet slowed to a crawl and is pretty much unusable, and the naltrexone is making us zombies. tomorrow we get to shower. We checked in 36 and 35 got in, better than I expected. They do tell you if you are an alternate before you check in, which can be crucial. I had an issue come up at screening. Went in, did my procedures, was told i was done, left. Got an email the next day that I needed to come back. I said I wasn't eager to make another 500 mile trip. They said then I'd be out of the study. I was able to get through to a supervisor the next day and get it all worked out; I just came in a little early at check-in. So there's a layer of the people who used to work there and screw up and don't care, another new layer of management who wants to get it right. If I hadn't been persistent, I would have paid for their mistake, either by another expensive trip or not being in the study. in short this is a place i will go for the money but it's not a place i like.
posted Mar 25th, 2014 ( permalink )