Janette Benaddi MICR CSci
Keywords
Board of Directors, ICR governance, Roles & responsibilities
The Institute of Clinical Research has a legal status of “a company limited by guarantee” and this means that it has to be managed by a Board of Directors. As members, you may wonder from time to time what the ICR Board of Directors do, who they are and how they add value to ICR members. I therefore felt that this month I would dedicate my column to this subject. I know that, before I joined the board myself, I used to contemplate what it was they did and who it was who was leading our organisation. I even secretly held the ambition of becoming a Board Director myself!
The ICR Board is made up of 13 Directors, one of which is our Chief Executive Officer, Dr John Hooper. The rest of the members of the board are mostly from clinical research backgrounds. There is a full biography for each Board member on the ICR website. The members of the Board come from diverse backgrounds and the Board tries to ensure that the Directors between them represent the different groups of our members or have had experience at some point in their career with the different areas of clinical research. This is important as we need to be able to understand what our members require from our organisation.
Your board usually meets six times per year, generally at the ICR offices, and have regular teleconferences in between these meetings to consider any unexpected issues. We also have an additional one- or two-day meeting each year to specifically discuss and determine our strategy and business plans each year; this meeting also involves senior staff from the office. Board meetings usually take a full day, with an agenda that reflects current issues related to ICR strategy and business objectives. The meetings are often quite intense as key decisions must be considered in depth before being made. The debate and discussion is extremely important and helps us ensure we take the decisions that are best for our Institute.
Your Board is a cohesive group of individuals who are motivated and extremely enthused about our Institute. As Board members, we give up our time freely, as do many other members who help with ICR activities. Most of us have ‘day jobs’ that are also quite demanding and ICR is extremely grateful to those companies who support their members of staff who volunteer their services to the Board. We are reimbursed for travel to and from meetings but certainly do not claim for gardeners, swimming pools, duck houses etc.(!). Our duties and responsibilities are quite extensive. We are responsible for leading our Institute, setting the strategy for our organisation and ensuring this is implemented. We do not normally get involved in the day-to-day operations of the organisation, which is ably managed by our excellent team of staff in the office. We do, however, have to manage the company on behalf of all our members; this means ensuring we comply with company law (and, indeed, the law in general) and making sure that we operate within the constraints of our Memorandum and Articles of Association (which can be found at
www.icr-global.org/membership/articles).
Board Directors have historically always been members of ICR, who are working in the field of clinical research and are knowledgeable about clinical research. At the Annual General Meeting held this year it was agreed that the Board would benefit from also including a small number of other professionals who might not be clinical researchers, such as having expertise in IT, accountancy and legal matters.
The Board is currently looking for three new Directors: one with clinical research expertise, an accountant or person with accounting skills and a lawyer or person with legal skills. Professional (MICR) members or Fellows (FICR) may either be nominated by another member, or self-nominate; in either case, though, nomination must be seconded by another voting member. Joining the Board is a big commitment and does require you to give up some of your time freely; it is also a large responsibility, which comes with no remuneration other than reimbursement of expenses. That said, it is extremely rewarding, interesting, often challenging and it is a wonderful opportunity to help our Institute and be a more proactive member. I do hope some of you will consider joining us, if you would like more information please contact John Hooper on
ceooffice@icr-global.org.
If you would like any more information or would like to understand more about what we do, please do get in touch; as your Chair, I think that it is extremely important that you have access to your Board and that you regularly receive useful communication and information from us.
Janette Benaddi MICR CSci (janette@medvance.co.uk) is Chief Executive Officer of Medvance Ltd and Chair of The Institute of Clinical Research.
