A team with strong cohesion and high execution is an important guarantee for conducting high-quality and sustainable clinical researches. Combined with the previous literature and the author’s view, this paper summarizes the key points of team building, which include a clear research direction, a balanced composition of team members, an outstanding team leader, the competence enhancement of team members, and a member-oriented management philosophy. Clear research direction is the premise of the existence and development of a team. Multi-level, multi-disciplinary membership can avoid potential conflicts of interest caused by homogeneity, and enable research to be refined and strengthened in interdisciplinary collisions. Team leader is the key to team development. The enhancement of team members’ competence is the cornerstone of team development. Adherence to member-oriented principle can form a true team culture. This paper aims to summarize and analyze the key points of clinical research team construction for peer reference.
The number of investigator initiated research (IIR) is increasing. But the recognition and management of IIR in China is still in its infancy, and there is a lack of specific and operable guidance for the implementation process. Based on our practical experiences, previous literature reports, and current policy regulations, the authors took prospective IIR as an example to summarize the implementation process of IIR into 14 steps, which are as the following: study initiation, ethical review, study registration, study filing, case report form design, database establishment, standard operating procedure making, investigator training, informed consent, data collection, data entry, data verification, data locking and data archiving.
Telephone follow-up is one of the important ways to follow up patients. High-quality follow-up can benefit both doctors and patients. However, clinical research-related follow-up is often faced with problems such as time-consuming, laborious and poor patient compliance. The authors belong to a team that has been committed to the study of patient-reported outcomes for a long time. The team has carried out long-term follow-up of symptoms, daily function and postoperative complications of more than 1 000 patients after lung cancer surgery, and accumulated certain experience. In this paper, the experience of telephone follow-up was summarized and discussed with relevant literatures from the aspects of clarifying the purpose of clinical research follow-up, understanding the needs of patients in follow-up, and using follow-up skills.