This Reading Room is a collaboration between MedPage Today® and:
Clinical research coordinators (CRCs) -- i.e., the specialized healthcare professionals who manage the day-to-day operations of clinical trials -- are critical to the success of clinical trials, but the stress and complexity of the job often leads to burnout and high rates of turnover. A study in JCO Oncology Practice offered insight into the situation as well as practical advice about how to help.
Jonathan Eliezer Cohen, MD, PhD, of the Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, and colleagues analyzed online survey responses from 121 CRCs at clinical trial units in Israel. The researchers used established measures to assess job engagement, work overload, job satisfaction, empathy, and burnout among the participants.
The team used conservation of resource theory to analyze relationships between the factors measured. As one might expect, work overload was positively associated with burnout and negatively associated with job satisfaction. A more important finding, however, was that higher levels of empathy amplified the effect of job satisfaction in a way that helped protect against burnout.
