ARE YOU DELEGATED?

As a healthcare worker, you probably know your way around the equipment used in your chosen path, be it a blood pressure machine, an X-ray machine or even a centrifuge. So when you start that new job, or change departments, you often would get stuck right in, helping out perform tasks on the ward or department, helping out colleagues and contributing to the patients smooth and safe journey whilst they are in hospital or clinic.

While offers of help are often met with gratitude and appreciation especially in a busy clinical setting and one is left to carry out tasks, within their scope of practice, i should add! The same cannot be said in a Clinical Research setting. That is not to say that your offers of help are not appreciated within a research setting, it just means that, even if your help was needed, your colleagues would not be able to call upon you unless you have been trained and delegated to whatever research study they would be working on.

Clinical research is heavily regulated as you would understand, since new medicines and Equipment are being tested and researched as to their usefulness and effectiveness before being licensed for use on the general population. So one would expect that a series of rigorous sets of rules and regulations are in place to ensure that the end product(s) are indeed suitable for human consumption and use. Amongst the long, essential list of regulations is one known as the ‘Delegation Log’.

The Delegation Log is a vital piece of documentation that is used to keep track of those that have been trained and then delegated tasks on a particular research study. It is an important part of a long list of checks and bounds that are put in place to protect the integrity of a research study. That is the reason why you cannot work on or perform any study related tasks unless you have been trained and delegated to those tasks by the Principal Investigator(PI) in charge of the study.

So when your kind offer of help is turned down next time, it is not because it is not needed and that your colleagues are not grateful, but it is because you are not on the delegation log and thus can not perform any study related tasks!