I have an amazing job!

I HAVE AN AMAZING JOB!

I am privileged to work with a team of very talented and enthusiastic people who run the WOMAN trial and a couple of others too. Just today we were told that over the last twelve months our three trials have accumulated over 8,000 patients, which in itself could easily be a whole trial.

The WOMAN trial is the longest running of our three currently ongoing emergency care trials of tranexamic acid, and one of several that I have administrated at the Clinical Trials Unit (CTU) over the last 15 years. Also in progress are the CRASH-3 trial (bleeding into the brain) and the HALT-IT trial (bleeding into the stomach), and yet more on the drawing board.

Being now one step removed from the day to day hustle and bustle (I oversee the administrative aspects, finances and drug related issues for the three trials mentioned above), others in our dedicated team are now in contact with our lovely collaborators and building long lasting friendships.

The setup process for the WOMAN trial started in 2008 with the planning and design of the protocol, database, treatment packs and trial materials. By 2010, excitement was building up as about 30 sites in Nigeria had national and local approvals and were eager to start. Anxious times were to follow as all systems were ready to go, but the first batch of the treatment packs had to be abandoned due to some major production problems.

However, we managed to get an emergency batch ready and within the first two months 15 Nigerian sites had started recruiting patients. The first patient was randomised by the wonderful team at University College Hospital, Ibadan. Hospitals in Albania, Cameroon, Nepal, Zambia and Pakistan were in the first flush of randomisers in 2010. In 2011 we welcomed sites from Bangladesh, Jamaica, Colombia, UK, Sudan and Ghana, and eight more countries have joined in over the last 3-4 years, the latest being Papua New Guinea. We are pretty much covering the whole world yet again, as we did with the CRASH-1 and CRASH-2 trials that preceded WOMAN.

The geographic and cultural spread of our collaborators gives our jobs a whole new fascinating aspect. We have a fantastic network of doctors, nurses, midwifes, research nurses, pharmacists and research coordinators all over the world and they are the ones putting patients into the trial – we are just keeping the strings together at this end.

As I said, I have an amazing job!