While working in a team, it is usually expected that every person in the team contributes equally efficiently to all the tasks assigned to the team. This way of project management would be ideal when all the members of the team are skilled in all the tasks assigned to them. While I was working on a clinical trial study with a few new recruits, the one challenge that we used to face is handling critical data/images. Before starting to work on a study, every employee who would be working on the trial would be trained on the study protocol and imaging requirements that need to be followed for every patient throughout the duration of the study. In some cases, we would receive imaging files that are non-compliant. New recruits as per the protocol, would automatically follow the Good Clinical Practice (GCP) of erasing any images that are out of the requirements of the study protocol. In actuality, those images would be sent by the principal investigator from the particular site, indicating an exceptional response to the drug by a particular patient. These images would be important for the efficacy prediction of the drug and form an important basis for analysis.

In order to resolve this issue, we would either re-assign the tasks to the new recruits for a certain period of time that does not involve handling critical information/data or re-train them on how to handle exceptional cases wisely in cases of non-compliance and non-adherence to the study’s imaging protocol.