The CCTST’s Acute Care Research Council (ACRC) was created in 2015 to develop a community of researchers engaged in pre-hospital, emergency and critical care settings with a common focus on accelerating clinical and translational research by reducing systems barriers and generating economics of scale through process improvement, resource sharing and development of best practices.

From the onset, the ACRC recognized the importance of highly trained clinical research professionals (CRPs) that can ensure rapid and proper research subject identification, consent, enrollment, and conduct of study procedures. Because of the constraints of ACR, the ACRC determined that ACR-CRPs required additional competencies beyond those of CRPs engaged in other types of clinical research. Moreover, developing such competencies is timely given the current focus on CRP workforce development.

The ACRC developed 28 competencies for ACR that can serve as a training guide for CRPs to be prepared for the challenges of conducting research within this vulnerable population. The competencies suggest a combination of competency-based training, behavioral-based hiring practices and continuing professional development will be essential to ACR success. Hiring, training, and supporting the development of this workforce is foundational to clinical research in this challenging setting...read more.