Communication massively yeah, you’ve gotta be able to communicate with everybody on every level and that’s if you can do that then that’s key.

That’s key, you know, because you’ve got so many people, you know, you’ve got your colleagues, you’ve got your patients, you’ve got your PI’s [Principal Investigators], you’ve got your study co-ordinators, you’ve got your monitors, you know, for, you know, the concept of that when I first started the role that somebody comes and sits by me and goes through everything I’ve done with a fine toothcomb, oh really, that would be a nice stress free day.

[laughs].

But, you know, it’s, it’s not as bad as you anticipate that to be and, you know, it’s a good thing because if there’s anything that needs picking up it can be picked up along the way and that’s good, sometimes, you know you just need things pointing out to you that, you know, this, this or this and, you know, it can be, it can be rectified more easily than if it’s left to go on and not picked up, so yeah.

I think this is not a job for someone who is, just waits for things to come to them. You have to be proactive, and that’s not a negative thing to a study team, they’ve got a billion things that they’re working on, and sometimes I think when they’re removed from us it’s easy to forget about the people on the ground, and what’s happening. So, going back to them and just saying, Hi it’s me, I’m just wondering is this? And again, I’ve never had anybody say, Oh it’s that nurse ringing us again, it’s not like that, they understand that we want to know cos we want to share. So just keep asking, and I don’t think there’s a problem with that.

And we get the support we need.

Yeah.

As well. It’s recognised that okay now we need to come off the ward for a while because there’s this many jobs to do, and we need to get all of this done first. And I think something our PI highlighted was it, one, recently in one of our away days, it’s like how important it is to set that time aside when you’re not on the ward and not recruiting, to catch up with all of the jobs that need doing in the background. So, I think that was, you know, feeding that back to the whole team was quite important because a lot of the time that is where the problem occurs when you’re expected to be doing that, but then you haven’t got time to do the other side of it. Which, because we have such a good relationship in our team, you know, I can say to the PI [Principal Investigator], I can say to her that you know I, I’m not finding time to do these jobs at the moment because I’m here, and I can’t, I haven’t got time to do both. And it’s taken on board, you’re heard, it’s taken on board and the support is put in place. And I think that has been brilliant.

Because it takes away the stress factor because you are being given the time you need, you are being given the support you need. And you’ve got people to turn to and people that will listen. So it gives, it actually, you know when you’re given that kind, you want to do more, it makes you want to do more, you then go that extra mile too. So, I personally think you know, something, one of our one of our consultants works on excellence and one of our clinical fellows working in an appreciative enquiry and things like that, and that is something they say excellence breeds excellence. And I tell you, they’re bang on.

If you look after your team you get, it’s very much more, it’s more productive. And they’ve got the right culture in this team.

But there seems to be an awful lot of people counting and over counting and doing more counting all the time about how many people you’ve recruited and how many this month and how many other people you recruited and this that and the other. So I think the focus seems to be less about, about the research really and you just feel, or you could feel it’s, like I say it’s a sales job really. I don’t think that’s very good for either the people doing it or for the patients actually because it’s, it’s not what it’s about or it shouldn’t really be what it’s about. And I also think the, I’m talking about clinicians really because they tend to be the people doing clinical trials obviously but it can also be scientists or whoever it is as well, can sort of stand back because the clinicians in particular tend to again have a lovely time designing these things and then they, you know, the ones that have money for a research nurse to do it, who do all the recruitment for them and then they get to, you know, analyse the data and write the papers and that strikes me as I don’t know I don’t know whether it’s unfair exactly because of course you know, that’s fair enough if you’re a researcher you wouldn’t want, you want to be able to do all of that yourself but I think sometimes they don’t- it’s not always teamwork, I think it’s sold as that.

So some clinical trials there’s a lot of talk about, “Oh this is a team thing, oh it’s really important that, you know, people come to our-“, I’m saying our’, people come to a clinic where I work and go, “There’s this project, do you want to get involved?” Lots of people go, “Yes, that would be great”. “How are we doing?” there’s lots of that talk about how, how well we’re doing but it’s literally what they’re talking about is how many people they’re getting to sign to do something.

What I’m seeing in diagnostic imaging is, is very sadly often they’re being used as the image taker in the study, rather than you know a co-author or a joint person on the project.

Which is really actually very unfair and something we need to look at because the current statistics I think are something like 98%, 99% of patients that go into a hospital will have some sort of imaging because imaging is, you know imaging is so, is so good now, you can see so much detail, in fact the, we’re even in the awful situation where we might be over diagnosing people because we’re seeing so much. And of course the human body isn’t perfect, so that’s causing us a little bit of problems as well. But I think what’s happening in a diagnostic department is they’re basically, they’re really getting swamped with work. And so the research element is getting dropped.

And if any research is being done, and as I say often they’re being used as the image taker in that, rather than part of the study. And there’s something very wrong in that. So going back to what I said, how I used to work before with my colleagues, that’s not the way I would’ve ever done it. I would’ve always said that they were part of it, and the images are a big part of a study. So I, I think that’s, that’s an important thing for me now as the officer who does look after research. I really need to be pushing that much more with other health professionals, to please, you know, when you’re, when you’re having images in a study, you know, involve your diagnostic radiographer colleagues in that as part of the team. Cos actually they could, they could add a lot of value. But I think it’s quite hard in that particular environment for them to break through that.