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Course hones skills of research coordinator The Research Coordinator Development Program will be held Sept. 18 through 29. Tuition is $3,000, $1,500 for MUSC employees and students. Call 792-2651 for information. by Dick Peterson Public Relations Research is business. It’s competitive, it brings in revenue, and research revenue finds its way to those who do it best. To improve the quality of research at MUSC, the College of Nursing and the MUSC Nursing Center for Professional Development launched a pilot course in June that teaches the how-to of good health care research and was funded by the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. The course will be offered again in the fall. Designed for the in-the-trenches, at-the-bench research coordinator, this two-week continuing education course “is to prepare participants to coordinate cost-effective health care research which protects the rights and safety of human subjects, achieves recruitment and retention outcomes, and contributes to the science of health care,” reads the course brochure for the Research Coordinator Development Program. College of Nursing faculty Pat Arford, Ph.D., R.N., and Nancee Sneed, Ph.D., R.N., lead the curriculum as course faculty, which also includes guest lecturers and preceptors from MUSC—one for each student. “I saw the need for a course like this first hand,” Arford said, recalling her role as Institutional Review Board II (IRB) vice chair and lead auditor. When auditing research projects for compliance to IRB protocol and federal regulations, research coordinators would ask for help with their studies.  “That was not the best time to offer help, not when I was the auditor,” Arford said. But the request was sincere, and the need real.  “The people principal investigators (PI) recruit for these positions do not necessarily have research backgrounds,” Sneed said. “They can be nurses or social workers...,” or anyone the PI believes can do the job.  The research coordinator follows the process of the research and federal regulations, recruits subjects for the study, advises and obtains informed consent, and preserves the integrity of the research data—all without necessarily having any previous training in research. Arford and Sneed want to fill that knowledge gap and offer the leg-up in training to departments and research centers across campus as well as nationally.  The course aims to help research participants protect the integrity of their studies, improve study outcomes and thereby attract future research contracts.  And that’s good business.