Research on Core Competency Elements of Clinical Investigators

To construct a competency model for clinical investigators involved in the process of new drug development, providing a reference for the training, selection and assessment of clinical investigators.

The Behavioral Event Interview (BEI) method was used to interview 12 excellent clinical investigators and 8 clinical investigators of average performance. Each competency characteristic was extracted from the interview text by semantic coding. Total frequency, total score, average score and highest score were calculated for each competency element. Category agreement coefficient, coefficient of reliability and Spearman correlation coefficient were used to assess the consistency of two coders for coding and classification. Independent-samples Mann-Whitney U test was applied to compare the differences in competency elements between the group of excellent clinical investigators and the group of average investigators.

The average coefficient of category agreement was 0.671, and the average coefficient of reliability was 0.803. No significant differences were observed between the two groups in the aspect of interview time (P = 0.190) and the interview words (P = 0.184), indicating comparability between the two groups. However, there was a clear performance difference between the excellent and average groups. In addition, we found that the competency model for clinical investigators contained 24 prominent competence elements and 8 benchmark competency elements.

Clinical investigator is a medical professional who is involved in a highly research-intensive and practical job, where prominent competency element largely reflects clinical practice skills, innovation and awareness of Good Clinic Practice (GCP). Our results provide a reference for assessing clinical investigators’ competencies, encouraging and guiding them to modify their behaviors according to the competency model, and also cultivating clinical investigators so as to improve the competence level of clinical investigators.