Training needs of clinical research associates

Clinical research is a relatively new field in our country that has seen very rapid growth in the last few years. Availability of personnel appropriately trained to the specific requirements of the role they will perform in clinical research is critical for capacity expansion. Our study attempts to understand the specific areas of knowledge and skills that are important for the role of a clinical research associate. The survey was conducted among clinical research professionals from industry and academia who had more than five years of clinical research experience and held important decision making positions in clinical research (stakeholders). The survey questionnaire was designed as a matrix of various clinical research roles on the y-axis and six knowledge modules and eight skills on the x-axis. Respondents were asked to rate the importance of the knowledge /skills to the role of clinical research associates on a three point scale. In discussing results, a significant response was considered to be 50% or greater positive response from the total group. The significant findings were that general, ethics and clinical trial execution modules were rated as critical for the role of clinical research associate. Regulatory module was rated as important for the role. The other significant responses were that three of the sub-topics in the methodology module - framing a research proposal/protocol and experimental design, designing case report forms and EDCs and conducting PK studies - were rated as important and one sub topic in the data management and statistics module was rated as not important. All the skills except leadership skills were rated as critical for the role. The findings of our survey were in general on the lines of expectations of performance of the role. The general, ethics and clinical trial execution modules are critical knowledge areas for the role of a clinical research associate. No clear trends emerged for some of the other modules. Leadership skills were not rated as critical to the role. This kind of a survey gives a good direction when training curriculum has to be designed for specific roles in clinical research. However, there is a need to expand the sample size to fine-tune the knowledge and skills areas.