You Do Not Need to Know Everything Yet

Part of Research Assistant (ASSIST) Training: What This Job Is, and What It Is Not.

About 2 minutes. Free, in your language, no account needed.

Nobody starts this job knowing it

Most people working in clinical research came from somewhere else. A hospital ward, a laboratory, a reception desk, a shop. The language is new to everyone at first.

You are not expected to arrive understanding protocols, monitors or case report forms. You are expected to do exactly what you are asked, write down what you did, and say something when you are not sure.

That last one is the whole job in one sentence.

What a clinical trial is, briefly

A group of people have agreed to take part in a study to find out whether a treatment works and whether it is safe. Everything that happens to them is planned in advance in a document called the protocol, and everything that actually happens is written down.

The writing down is not paperwork around the real work. For a trial, it is the real work. A thing that happened and was not recorded cannot be used, and a thing recorded wrongly can point the whole study at a wrong answer.

Where you fit

You will prepare rooms and supplies. You will greet participants and take them where they need to go. You will copy numbers from one place to another. You will notice things.

None of that sounds important until you consider what happens if it goes wrong. A blood tube with the wrong label sends one person's result into another person's record. A visit booked outside its window puts a result outside the plan. A comment a participant makes on the way out, not passed on, can be the first sign of a side effect.

The one habit to build now

When you do not know, ask. Not later, not after you have guessed. The people around you would far rather answer a question than correct a record, and every one of them was new once.