If one takes the view that the tenets of patient centricity in healthcare include supporting not only patients but also the people who stand closest to them, then supporting the clinical research coordinators (CRCs) who have the most patient-facing role in clinical trials should be a critical focus, according to the creator of an award-winning poster presented earlier this year at ACRP 2026 in Orlando.
In her poster on “Addressing the CRC Workforce Crisis Through Job Design and Collaboration,” which won second place in the non-student category among those presented at the conference, ACRP Member Toshiko Ishibashi, RN, PhD, Patient Centricity Lead with Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd., in Japan, notes that the CRC workforce crisis represents an industry-wide challenge that requires collective action. Problems tied to workforce turnover and dissatisfaction, she explains, are partially a result of fragmentation in the drug development process that leads to CRCs having difficulty understanding how their work fits into the overall process, and how their daily tasks contribute to patients and society.
“CRCs often have limited visibility into what precedes and follows their work,” Ishibashi says. “Combined with heavy daily workload, this makes it difficult to connect tasks with purpose and weakens the key drivers of intrinsic motivation” for staying on the job and excelling at it.
Ishibashi hypothesizes that restoring the “connection” from drug discovery to patient administration and reaffirming the indispensable role of CRCs within the pharmaceutical ecosystem will improve intrinsic motivation and work quality. In her poster, she also provides detailed information on a reciprocal “exchange of workplaces” program between bench- and bedside-based research professionals aimed at helping them visualize the “people” and “passion” behind each other’s work. The poster covers observations from two such events held thus far, in which a total of 48 CRCs and pharmacists from 13 sites visited a Daiichi Sankyo research center and manufacturing facility and interacted with a total of 53 scientists in such roles as pharmaceutical technology, analytical evaluation, bioprocessing, and others.
“By getting to know the ‘people’ at pharmaceutical companies, the CRCs’ mindset when handling investigational drugs shifted from ‘task’ to ‘collaboration,’” Ishibashi says. Further, the pharmaceutical company–based researchers “gained a real understanding of how ‘specifications’ actually impact patients and healthcare providers.”
Noting that her employer has established a board to regularly seek advice from CRCs on protocol design, informed consent forms, and patient diaries to ensure feasibility, as well as leveraged CRC expertise to capture details about patients’ quality of life that are not visible in the data for future trial planning, Ishibashi issues a call to action for pharmaceutical companies to “treat CRC knowledge as a ‘treasure’ and pay respect to their expertise.”
“When CRCs feel their knowledge is valued, their internal motivation rises, directly combating the workforce crisis,” she says. “To sustain patient-centric clinical research, we must redesign the CRC work environment—not only through systems, but through mutual respect, shared understanding, and collaboration.”
Reported by Gary Cramer
