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My NHS & Research Journey

Read about the latest new team member, Melanie Williams, who joins us from 20 years in the NHS!

Having just completed my twentieth year working for the NHS, I decided to take up the challenge of joining the CIRU team and becoming part of the EDGE Programme as a Client Manager. What led me here? I thought I’d share my journey.

I started out in the NHS as an Appointment Coordinator for two-week wait cancer referrals and after a couple of years, I progressed to become the first UHS Multi-disciplinary Team Co-ordinator for the breast team. I enjoyed this very much, but research came-a-calling when some folks who attended the MDT meetings picked up on my organisational skills, love of lists, and ‘chattiness’, and I’ve never really looked back.

I became a Clinical Trials Assistant and started out working on breast and haematology cancer studies, mainly completing clinical report forms, resolving data queries, and managing site files. As my confidence in the role grew, I asked to attend clinics and became patient-facing, leading recruitment on observational and quality of life studies, as well as working with a fantastic team of research nurses on CTIMP trials.

This is where my love for research really grew. I’ve seen research reap rewards – it works. Being able to contribute towards research that has changed ‘best’ practice and improved the lives of patients and their families has been incredibly rewarding. I think really, I should say I’m passionate about research. I believe all patients should be invited to take part in research if possible. Research gives patients a chance to learn more about their condition and to try new treatments or devices. For most patients, it also helps them to know that their engagement in research provides future patients with a better chance of improved health and social care.

Research introduced me to EDGE through working on observational, QoL, and CTIMP studies. I found EDGE invaluable whilst working on these – not only did I have immediate access to patient-related documents like PIS, consent forms, and GP letters, I could also update my recruitment data in real-time with patient demographics as well as study-specific identifiers and keep the patient status updated from pre-screened through to completed or off study. This was really time saving when I could complete this data whilst in clinic between patients. It was also super handy being able to download reports via the Excel and PDF features to prepare recruitment reports which I presented at study meetings.

Now that I have moved to CIRU, I’m hoping my experience of being an end user of EDGE can help when dealing with client and user needs. I can see the importance of innovation in the clinical research setting (the roll out of EDGE 3 being one of these), and how fast paced research has become, which is vital to organisations, staff, and all research participants.

My experience within research has been relatively short but a varied one up to this point. I have gained unique experiences and have learnt much about research over the last 4 years. Not only is research an extremely rewarding practice to be a part of but our governments drive for the UK to lead in research for patient care and economic growth also makes for a gratified career prospect.

I first got into research after working for 9 years within many different Pharmacy departments at Southampton General Hospital. Being well aware the step up to a Pharmacy technician wasn’t for me, I knew it was time to take another route. At that time I took an opportunity within the Clinical Trials Pharmacy department as a Senior Clinical Trials Assistant. Dispensing trial drugs and accountability were key aspects of my day to day duties within that role as well as ensuring nurses received their prescription drugs on time for their patient’s appointments. Due to the importance of time windows within most CTIMP protocols, each dispensing item had a time limit from receiving the script to a final technician check. This could be very stressful at times when the pharmacy was extremely busy and as most prescriptions were not presented in advance this could not be predicted. Other essential tasks involved recouping costings from commercial studies by collating finance figures from site file accountability logs. This was very important as our department mostly relied on funding coming in from commercial trials.

After 6 months I was employed as a ‘Pharmacy Clinical Trials Co-ordinator’, an extremely rewarding role where I was solely responsible for over a million pounds worth of trial medication. Good relations and communication with PI’s, Co-Investigators and Nurses were pivotal for preparing CTIMP deliveries and prescriptions, enabling chemotherapy and other trial IVs to be made in the aseptic’s in time for patient’s appointments. As IVs all have various expiries (once made) it’s imperative my organisation skills were on point. Some medication can quickly expire, wasting thousands of pounds of stock while also holding up a treatment chair in a busy cancer clinic, in turn wasting pharmacy and research teams’ valuable time.

With a taste of research I felt it was the right time to move away from Pharmacy after 10 years and I joined the Lung Research team within the same hospital. A small team of 5 (Including myself), consisting of 2 senior nurses and 3 research assistants.

My time was split supporting senior nurses with administration duties such as updating trial site files and inputting data into ECRFs after patient visits, while the other half was assisting in coordinating 100,000 genomes project implementation into the trust. Along with this I also gained consent from patients for the TargetLung study. This would entail following patients through their standard of care journey, taking their bloods and processing bodily fluids in a lab for scientists to process. I would also collect tumour tissues from many different procedures in order to help researchers try and improve their knowledge of how the immune system works with lung diseases. As you can imagine this was an extremely insightful way of learning how laboratories, theatres and various departments work together in research.

With the above hands on experience of clinical trials on my side, it has assisted me a great deal as a Knowledge Officer at the Clinical Informatics Research Unit, in understanding what clinical research teams need to carry out their occupations effectively. The CIRU team has a great diversity of experience from all aspects of research departments which helps us solve problems and brainstorm issues efficiently with good understanding of our users. Naturally there are times when issues arise where we are not familiar, but good relationships with CRNs and the Trusts keeps the CIRU team up to date with current affairs which is helpful for running the EDGE programme.

Blog post written by Lee Pearce,
EDGE Knowledge Officer, CIRU
University of Southampton