I’m grateful to be surrounded by such a compassionate community
My name is Frida Latif, and I’m a clinical research operations coordinator in Group Clinical Services (GCS). Having joined the team just a few months before the pandemic, I have been able to support clinical research by ensuring that all services continue to run smoothly.
With over 300 clinical trials currently running in GCS, there’s a huge amount of data to be collected and processed every day. My role concentrates on ensuring all these activities are captured, and turning them into reports to help us forecast of our capacity and capabilities.
When the pandemic first hit, our staffing levels and capacity was greatly affected - which was a worrying time to say the least. This pushed me to look at the data we have even further to find trends and clues on how we can help and support all the specialities. I was able to put together a comprehensive statement report that allows us to understand this in detail, using multiple different sources understand how the teams are doing. I also completed SOPs and put systems in place to automate tasks where errors occur often to reduce breaches and improve our service timescales. Implementing these changes when staff are so busy has been a challenging task and I have learnt a huge amount through this experience.
In addition to this, I am currently redeployed to support the ENSEMBLE-2 Covid-19 vaccine study, and look after the data collected from symptomatic patients post-injection. I was also previously redeployed to support the testing of COVID-19 antibodies in healthcare staff. Playing my part to help us understand Covid-19 has been very rewarding and is something I am immensely proud of.
The International Clinical Trials day coincides with my 2 years with NHS and I can’t help but reflect on this highly unusual period. Being in GCS, I have not only been able to see the intricate nature of research operations, but also the sheer amount of hard-work put in by every single person involved. I’m grateful to be surrounded by such a compassionate community and hope to continue to be a part of the combined efforts in improving patient care.