ABSTRACT
Clinical Research Associates (CRAs), also called clinical trial co-ordinators/scientists/officers/executives or monitors in different companies, are usually graduates with a background in a biological science, eg zoology, pharmacology, biochemistry, pharmacy or physiology. They should be able to communicate well, both verbally and in writing. They need to have very good personal skills — people should enjoy meeting them and they should be persuasive. Very often this means they have considerable personal confidence and are quite mature and interesting people. Obviously they must be bright and presentable because they are dealing with sophisticated professionals (doctors and medical scientists, as well as pharmacologists, etc). Over the past ten years, the job has become more controlled, so CRAs also need to be rather obsessive in terms of checking CRFs and meticulous in formally reporting, for example, any adverse events which patients might experience.
