CRP Bulletin -December 2022

Experienced Practitioner Gateway to CRP Accredited Registration - latest news

Fiona O'Neill, Professional Advisor (CRPs), Academy for Healthcare Science

Thank you to all who responded to the Expression of Interest. We received over 100 responses, indicating there will be significant engagement with the Gateway. We have also completed the pilot process. This means the first group of applicants have met the criteria that demonstrates they have sufficient experience and knowledge to make an application to the CRP Accredited Register. The review of the pilot applications identified the importance of applicants clearly outlining their experience at practitioner level and also following the published guidance to ensure their application is complete. All applications are required to include confirmation from their line manager.

Please find the Guidance and the CRP Gateway Eligibility Template.

Applicants who have level 5 educational qualifications (eg foundation degree) are also asked to upload their certificate as evidence. All applicants will also be required to submit a non-returnable administration fee of £10 that will help to cover the costs associated with running the Gateway process. We will endeavour to meet demand in a timely way and hope the opportunity to join the Accredited Register via the Gateway will help to boost numbers and contribute to the continuing development of the CRP community.

The Gateway will open in January and there will be further communications through the Directory, newsletter and website in the New Year.

For further information please contact crpadmin@ahcs.ac.uk

Incredible engagement from CRPs for our ‘lunch and learn’ webinars!

Kirsty Rogers, Education and Training Manager, LCRN Wessex Core Team

Following the great success of CRP registration in other LCRNs nationally, Kirsty Gladas, our Senior Clinical Research Nurse Manager raised the question of why we were not seeing as many CRPs sign up to the directory or continue to work to become registered within the LCRN Wessex region. A number of discussions locally with our colleagues and at partner organisations, led us to discover that there was misunderstanding in our local community in relation to the terminology (directory vs register) and what the title itself meant.

Knowing how busy everyone is, it was decided that the development of a series of webinars to provide our potential CRP community easy access to learning events, relating to CRP registration, would be a great way to demystify the process. This was to be aimed at both clinical research staff who may be eligible to join the directory or apply for accredited registration, as well as their managers. We aimed to provide an insight into the various workstreams, highlight some key pieces of documentation and to provide real life examples from our colleagues who have already navigated the process. Sometimes you just need to know it has worked for someone else!

During the month of November, we held 4 sessions over the lunchtime period to provide both information and opportunities for questions focusing on the following areas:

Week 1 - Overview of the CRP role

Week 2 - Insight into the day of the life of a CRP

Week 3 - Acting as a CRP confirmer and identifying, supporting and developing future CRPs

Week 4 - Recap and reflection summaries of previous sessions, reflective practice overview and next steps

On launching the dates via Eventbrite, we were overwhelmed with interest and excitement about these webinar events and soon increased our tickets to 100 per session which is fantastic. It was evident that these webinars would benefit our community; this was the encouragement we needed.

We were so lucky to have speakers for the webinars who were able to provide such rich examples from their experiences of navigating the CRP accredited registration process. We were delighted to have colleagues who are leading the NIHR workstreams join us, from both our LCRN as well as from the NIHR CC. We also were able to explore the views of staff considering joining the CRP directory, those who have been through the process and been accepted on the register through to those who have supported their staff to gain registration and what this means for future workforce planning for CRP roles.

During the sessions, we were able to dedicate time for attendees to ask questions and have the panel of speakers provide clarity on their concerns or queries. Examples of questions ranged from whether being on the register would change your job title, entry requirements for CRP accredited register, to what kind of competencies and standards are required. It is worth noting that we had some questions to take back to the workstream leads and that some things are still being developed due to the stage of the CRP role development. It was reassuring to attendees that these questions were heard, even if we could not provide an immediate answer! We really appreciated the engagement from our attendees - it definitely helped us to focus on the areas which were causing concern for potential CRP registrants.

We were ecstatic to receive immediate thanks from attendees to say how useful they found the sessions. We’re looking forward to reviewing the post webinar feedback to see what was most useful to learn from for future events of this type as well as using the information to provide to the CRP workstream leads for their next steps.

In order to make sure that the content is accessible to all, we decided that we would record the sessions to add to NIHR Learn for access after the events. The webinars should be accessible to anyone with a Learn account by navigating to the CRP area in the Wessex instance of Learn. Currently, we are busy adding subtitling to the videos and finalising our CRN Wessex CRP Toolkit to add to NIHR Learn to provide all the information our potential CRPs may need to successfully complete their registration!