Advancing your career with Clinical Research Practitioner accreditation
- 4 December 2024
- 4 min read
Charlie Piercy joined the Academy for Healthcare Science (AHCS) Accredited Register for Clinical Research Practitioners in December 2021. Read about how the register helped him advance his career.
Charlie is a Clinical Research Practitioner (CRP) based in the Intensive Care Unit at Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust. CRP is an umbrella term for patient facing roles in research delivery and where the postholder isn’t currently registered to a healthcare profession.
Charlie worked on clinical trials in the private sector before joining the NHS in 2020. He's currently working towards a PhD at the University of Surrey while working as a CRP.
Route into research
Charlie graduated with a Masters in Biomedical Sciences in 2012. Charlie’s first job was with a large contract research organisation, which specialised in Phase I clinical trials. Over 5 years with the company, he worked on dozens of ‘first in human’ trials. The company trained him as a healthcare assistant. He learned skills such as how to take observations and ECGs. While in this role, Charlie also trained in clinical research, including trial design and Good Clinical Practice (GCP).
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Charlie realised he had skills to offer the NHS. He joined the Urgent Public Health Team at the Royal Surrey to work on COVID-19 studies. Over the next few years, Charlie worked on many of the national trials that helped the NHS to find new ways to treat and manage the disease.
The benefits of CRP accreditation
In 2021, the AHCS Accredited Register for CRPs was launched. The register is part of a professionalisation strategy for the role. CRPs are vital to addressing capacity issues within the research delivery workforce. The register recognises a standard of practice and offers assurances to employing organisations that an individual has satisfied certain levels of training and competencies.
Around this time, Dr. Ben Creagh-Brown, an intensive care consultant at the Royal Surrey, approached Charlie and asked him to lead a new research project. Charlie became a registered CRP, which enabled him to advance the project.
Becoming registered brings many benefits, according to Charlie. He says: “Being on the CRP Register gives you an acknowledged identity within the NHS workforce and a set of standards to work within. There’s a clear framework and scope of practice and that allows you to upskill within that."
“Being registered also offers professional development opportunities. For example, it can allow you to apply for funding to conduct your own research project, which has been an essential step to building my career in clinical research.”
Leading his own research and supporting others
Charlie’s first independent research project as a CRP was called JEDI1. It looked at a new way to collect tissue from blood vessels for use in research. The research focused on the cells that line the blood vessels, known as endothelial cells. The initial proof-of-concept project showed that these cells could be gathered, with patient permissions, from used medical guidewires or catheters that are otherwise discarded.
During the project, Charlie moved from the Urgent Public Health Team to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). There he was able to progress his research while also supporting his colleagues and other research studies.
Charlie explains: “I’ve now worked with 3 different research teams at the Royal Surrey and contributed to each of them in different ways, whether that’s liaising with and supporting patients, ensuring trial protocols are followed, carrying out lab work or writing up results. As a CRP, your work can be really varied but it’s all as part of a team.”
What the future holds
Charlie was awarded funding from the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine and the University of Surrey for a follow-on study to JEDI1. Using discarded medical equipment, he is comparing the endothelial cells of three different groups: ICU patients with sepsis, patients who have undergone surgery and healthy volunteers. He wants to see if inflammation markers in the cells relate to the health condition of each group. This will form the research topic of his PhD.
Charlie is already thinking of next steps and how he can support others. He says: “My own research wouldn’t have been possible without the support from my mentor and other colleagues at the Royal Surrey, along with Professor Christian Heiss and Dr Paola Campagnolo at the University of Surrey. So much time, energy and support has been given to me – my aim is to pay that back and open doors for others as they’ve been opened for me.”
