The purpose of this questionnaire is to better understand the menstrual cycle, and hormonal contraception as a means to control menstruation, and any impacts on female paramedics/patient tranport officers/student paramedics/communications officers, when menstruating and carrying out their duties/clinical placement in the paramedic environment.
Your participation will involve completion of a online questionnaire (Likert scale with some free-text options) that will take approximately 20 minutes of your time (depending on the length of any free-text responses that you would like to make, and whether you use hormonal contraception or not or have done so in the past). Your participation in this project is entirely voluntary and anonymous. If you do not wish to take part, you are not obliged to. If you decide to take part and later change your mind, you will be unable to withdraw data collected about yourself after you have participated in the questionnaire. Your decision on whether you take part, do not take part, or take part and then withdraw, will in no way impact your current or future relationship with the University of Southern Queensland.
Expected Benefits: It is expected that this project will not directly benefit you, however it may benefit future female paramedics by informing both industry and research in the field of paramedicine.
Risks: Participants are asked to complete a survey which is expected to take approximately 20 minutes to complete. As paramedics are required to complete 30 hours of CPD as part of their professional registration, this study poses no greater risks than day-to-day living activities associated with being a paramedic. The names of individual persons are not required in any of the responses.
Please note: Non-identifiable data from this project may be used as comparative data in future projects or stored on secure database for secondary analysis. Research outcomes from this project will be published in peer-reviewed literature (including only non-identifiable participant information). Any data collected as a part of this project will be stored securely, as per University of Southern Queensland’s Research Data and Primary Materials Management Procedure.
Consent to Participate: Clicking on the ‘Submit’ button at the conclusion of the questionnaire is accepted as an indication of your consent to participate in this questionnaire element of the research project.
Questions: Please contact the Principal Researcher (Lisa.Hobbs@usq.edu.au) to have any questions answered or to request further information about this project.
Ethics Approval: This project has been deemed low risk by the University of Southern Queensland’s Human Research Ethics Committee (UniSQ HREC). HREC Project ID: ETH2023-0102.
Concerns or Complaints: If you have any concerns or complaints about the ethical conduct of the project, you may contact the University of Southern Queensland, Manager of Research Integrity and Ethics on +61 7 4631 1839 or email researchintegrity@usq.edu.au. The Manager of Research Integrity and Ethics is not connected with the research project and can address your concern in an unbiased manner.
There are 34 questions in this survey.
