Challenges and Training Needs for Clinical Research Associates—A Survey

The objective of this articls is to understand the perceptions of clinical research associates (CRAs) about the time and effort required for monitoring; their importance in protecting the rights, safety, and well-being of subjects and data integrity; and their expectations about training needs and approaches. To these ends, a survey was conducted among 192 professionals with monitoring experience. Among other findings, the results show that CRAs rated source data verification as the most time-consuming activity, co-monitoring visits are the most preferred approach to learn monitoring, and CRAs need more training to learn to interact with principal investigators. There is a gap between CRAs’ perception of the importance of monitoring activities and the time spent on them.