hey guys ECR G here back with another video today I'm doing an article review
and the article is titled can a new partnership solve the CRA shortage now I
know a lot of people that watch this channel are interested in becoming CRA s
because of you know just the great overall experience the ability to travel
across the country and make good money while you're at it as well but there is
a huge shortage of CRA s in the industry and it can be felt from everywhere
across the CRO I used to be on studies with it where they just could not get C
arrays they would have a couple C arrays on the study but they needed many more
to conduct you know s IVs site initiation visits and pre study
selection visits you know all these type of visits that C arrays do they just did
not have enough to get them done so what happened is the CTLs would have to step
in or even sometimes a project manager would have to step in and conduct these
visits just because they could not get enough CRA s now a lot of companies are
starting to do training programs throughout the year but that stopped in
2017 for the most part because of all of the condensation of companies in the
clinical research space and but now it's there's not much going on in 2018 so
these are starting to pick back up again and you're gonna see if you're looking
on indeed or just you know looking around on LinkedIn or looking for the
job in clinical research you should see CRA training programs start to pop up
and even entry-level CRA roles that people with no experience can get in to
be a CRA now entry-level and CRA s it can be confusing because that could mean
anywhere from literally zero experience to up to two years of clinical research
experience and that's an entry level CRA that's something that I don't like that
the industry does because typically entry-level means no experience so they
should just call it a CRA one instead of calling an entry-level CRA but that's
neither here nor there now this article provides a unique expects
a unique perspective on how to help solve the CRA shortage so we're gonna
dive into that right here so they're saying essentially that you
know the CRA shortage is a sight is pretty much a self-fulfilling cycle
because if you don't have a lot of CRA s it makes me it makes more people want to
be see a raise because of the inflated salary and because there's not enough
CRA s to distribute the workload there's going to be a lot of people that are
gonna be overworked by that increased workload and then they jump you can jump
anywhere to any company pretty much any company's always looking for experiencia
raise at all times it's been that way for decades now but every company
because of the growth of the industry every company is looking for experience
see arrays so you never have to worry about a job after you become a CRA
because someone else will take you even if your reviews are bad even if you're
just a mediocre CRA you can get a job and that's good that's a good field to
be in for the employee that definitely benefits the employee and I'm all for
empowering and benefiting the employee so there this article is essentially
saying that because those people overworked they leave and they go to a
different company and then companies have hard times filling that role so
it's a you know a full self-fulfilling cycle and then someone else comes in
they're overworked and then they leave also so there's a lot of turnover in the
CRA space which i think again is good for the employee but it's bad for the
sponsor when you want something done when you want to do stuff you want to be
able to go fast you want to you want to have your foot on the gas and be able to
go fast and the only way to do that is to limit turnover essentially have no
turnover so that's frustrating to sponsors when you're trying to get stuff
done and you're just constantly changing up the team so there's a new partnership
coming out which is it's called in Oz foreign between the collaboration of VRS
SCC recruitment and I ILO CR which is the international
I think association of clinical research and I'm familiar with that organization
because I have heard that they are starting to do more accrediting of
monitors as they say in this article and I know some companies are using them
already I believe CEOs health is one of them to
help accredit their monitors and what that beta centrally says is you have a
certain competency level if you get this accreditation so it's good because I
talked to some people at CEOs and they say that the company pays for it and you
know it's basically included in your training which is good because that goes
with you throughout your career that's something forever so you get some
letters behind your name which is awesome so I'm sure we're gonna see a
bunch of other organizations start to adopt this as well these those training
metric because once you get it it makes it a lot easier to sell yourself to a
sponsor as well so sponsors like it because obviously they want somebody
with experience but really what they're trying to focus on this new organization
is competency so you can see right here in all will offer a comprehensive early
talent service that selects candidates and develops CRA competencies in them
the problem with the industry has been that sponsors want people with
experience but just because you have experience doesn't mean you're actually
good so what they're trying to focus more on now is competency how good are
you because somebody who's been doing it for a year it could be better than
someone who's been doing it for three years
you know there's talent to this just like in everything so let you know like
they say here they generally want to hire people with two years of entry of
industry experience which is true and you know it's it's been a problem as
they're saying I didn't even realize this but you know rapidly growing
industry and they've seen retirement of experience COAS
so you know I guess once they get up there in age and they don't want to be
on the road as much anymore they're retiring which is good I mean sometimes
I mean I know CRA is that have been doing it for 15 20 years and you know
eventually the the road life gets gets boring it gets is tiring you get burnout
so that's interesting and you know it's interesting that they're going to the
college level too and I think this is a good skill I mean a good tactic because
people and in are in the age group millennial and younger man they just
want to travel and so CRA they want to travel and have impact
so CRA is the perfect job for them because they're gonna love being on the
road in those early years when you have not many commitments and you know that's
just pretty much what it is but really the program is just gonna essentially
make sure that you have the right competencies to become a CRA a qualified
CRA and they're gonna place you in positions that have been unfilled so you
know can can this actually work and you know I think it can work if the sponsors
want it to work because the sponsors dictate everything they're writing the
check so they pretty much are gonna dictate what happens so if they accept
people with this certification and say hey you guys are competent enough to
monitor then everything is gonna be all good it's really the sponsors that are
dictating this CR o--'s would create more training programs if they could get
the sponsor to approve of them with six months experience a year of experience
but sponsors have clamped down and said we want two years experience industry
experience before anyone can become a CRA so that's what it is right now
that's why it's so hard for them to get new talent even though so many people so
many people people email us at elite clinical group at gmail.com all the time
wanting to be cra-z everyone wants to be a CRA that's part of the reason why I
even started this channel was to help people get into the CRA role but that's
that's just one of the things everyone wants to be a CRA but it's very hard to
become a CRA you've got to put your time in you got to do 1 to 2 years I mean
maybe you can even get lucky with one year if you get into a program which are
very competitive and hard to get into but once you do two years then a sponsor
is more likely to accept you so that's pretty much what this boils
down to will the sponsor accept you and that's why they're building this
training course because they want the sponsor to be able to accept you and
they're gonna build it based on competencies because experience that's
gonna take two years but this training program could take you know six months
for you to become competent enough six months a year to cut the time in half so
and then they also go on to talk about in this article you know universities
can help with the problem I noticed that my university my University of big
science and engineering University and you know they have there's a lot of bio
texts and pharma companies in the area of the university never once at the
University did I hear about CRA or anything else of
the dental school nursing school a little bit of PA in there in medical
school that's all I heard about I didn't hear about any chiropractic or podiatry
no nothing all I heard about was literally dentist nurse doctor and a
little bit of physician assistant that's it and then you then you know if it
wasn't for a friend then I wouldn't have even heard about being a CRA so I'd
still like a pretty secretive industry not a lot of people know about it so
definitely see arrows and pharmaceutical companies can do a lot more in reaching
out to universities and making sure that students know hey this is a viable
career option and you can make a pretty decent living doing it so I think that's
a great opportunity as well for them to get more talent is reach out to the
universities reach out to where the next generation of talent is gonna be so yeah
so I mean I think this is this is a good start
I think it will work but I think the buck eventually just stops with the
sponsors if the sponsors want two years experience they're gonna get two years
experience this isn't gonna help anything if they're open to having less
than two years experience then the industry is gonna open up
the CEOs are gonna put out more training programs for people that are under two
years experience so right now they're trying to make the argument that
competencies more important so if they can get people that are
competent and build them up to be competent to become CRA s
then they're gonna pitch that to the sponsor and see what they say but if the
sponsor says no then I firmly believe this will not work it all just depends
on how how open the sponsor is to this and you know rightly so they do want
people that are experienced because they're paying a lot of money for these
monitors think about it you're paying flights and these flights aren't booked
well in advance these flights are booked you know maybe a few weeks in advance at
most a couple weeks in advance at most you know traveling all around the
country so you're not getting great deals so you know they got to pay for
that then they got to pay for the hotel you know CRA don't stay in like Motel
six you know a lot of times there's ten in the W they're staying you know the
Hilton downtown Doubletree they're staying they're staying in nice places
and you got to pay meals and all that stuff then you got to pay the actual
cost of monitoring so I mean a lot of these CRA s are making seventy thousand
dollars minimum and up you know upwards of 125 130 hundred forty thousand
dollars so it's not cheap to to finance a CRA and imagine if you're financing
the whole team you know you get a four or five six seven C arrays on the team
that can add up quickly for a sponsor so they're fine paying the money because a
lot of these companies are multi-billion dollar companies you know making twenty
billion thirty forty billion dollars a year so they can finance it but they
definitely want to make sure that their money is well spent that they are
getting the best monitoring and the best data from their clinical trial as
possible so that's really why the CRA is so vital and they want to make sure that
they're both competent and experienced so actually me just even saying that
that's probably where their sponsors are actually gonna go they're gonna say okay
we want to make sure that they're competent but why not have both why not
have someone that's competent and experienced why can't we just why can't
we just get why we have to just settle for someone that's competent so
obviously the best people are gonna get paid the most competent
the most most the most competent are gonna get paid and the most experienced
are gonna get paid the most as well but because we're in that shortage period
this this group of people are trying to make the push that hey you know
competency can sometimes override experience so I'm opposed to this link
in the description box so you guys can read the article yourself but I thought
it was interesting read hope you guys enjoyed it as always if you want my take
on one of these articles you can email me the article at elite clinical group
at gmail.com or post it down below in the comment section and I can do a
review I like to reviewing these articles is because I get other people's
perspectives not just my own but you can get my perspective on their perspective
if you understand what I'm saying alright guys I'm out email me
elite clinical group at gmail.com peace