Janette Benaddi MICR CSci
Keywords
Demographics, Diversity, ICR membership
The Institute of Clinical Research is an organisation built by its members for its members and this month, as many of us return from our summer vacations I thought it would be interesting to share with you more information on the demographics of the entire ICR membership. In July’s issue, I spoke about your Board of Directors and although they play an important part in determining the future of ICR, it is you, our members, who really shape our future.
If you have had the opportunity to attend our Annual Conference you will have experienced at first hand the diversity of our members and will have perhaps been astounded by the different fields our members work in. We have roughly 6000 members, mostly based in the UK, although this is starting to grow throughout the rest of the world. Our long-term plans are to grow our organisation on a more international basis and we are slowly starting to see this develop.
At 30%, the majority of our members come from the pharmaceutical industry, closely followed by 27% of you working for CROs, and I dare say many of these will be also working in the pharmaceutical field. Other affiliations include the medical device sector, the biotech sector and site management organisations. At least 7% of you are freelancers and we even have some members who are retired! We have a steady growth of members coming from other organisations too, such as healthcare institutions including the NHS in the UK, Academic institutions and Research Ethics Committee members and representatives. There are also a small number of members who provide other services to the clinical research industry such as printers, equipment suppliers and laboratories. The list goes on and please forgive me if you haven’t received a mention yet.
Your functional roles are also extremely diverse, the majority as you may expect are study coordinators or study monitors, approximately a quarter of you. We track 30 different functional roles recorded so you can imagine I am sure what some of these may be, but as an example these vary right across the spectrum of clinical research activities including pharmacists, statisticians, data management, medical writing, regulatory affairs and more.
The number of years’ experience is mostly centred at around 20 years, which means we have a large number of members who are extremely skilled. The second highest group are the newer entrants to clinical research and those with fewer than 5 years’ experience. A very small percentage, which is probably mostly students and very new entrants to clinical research, have fewer than two years experience. It is clear that we are a group of highly qualified, experienced and skilled professionals.
As an Institute for professionals it is important we try our best to cater for all our members whether minority or majority. You may think that with such diversity in roles and affiliations this might be difficult. However, the one thing that we all have in common is that we are involved in clinical research in one form or another and often what is interesting to one group of members will be interesting to another. It is also interesting to note that the data we have on our members does in many ways reflect the industry in terms of the types of functional jobs and the general clinical research field.
Your Institute is currently looking at improving the way we communicate with all our members and what we offer. We have recently adjusted the membership prices to more closely reflect the costs to serve our members and help to bring us more in line with other professional bodies. We are looking at new ways of serving the specialist groups and are constantly striving to improve our service offerings. If there is something you feel we should be delivering please get in touch with us; as a member you have a voice and you can influence our future.
Janette Benaddi MICR CSci (janette@medvance.co.uk) is Chief Executive Officer of Medvance Ltd and Chair of The Institute of Clinical Research.
