My first audio interview for Clinical Research focus
Posted by Andrew Smith on September 12, 2007
A little later today, I’ll be doing my first ever interview as a “broadcast” journalist. Admittedly, given the particular niche I report on, a better term would probably be “narrowcast”. However, I’m still excited about it, not to mention a little nervous!
I will be interviewing Sue Fitzpatrick, Education Manager here at The Institute of Clinical Research (ICR), talking particularly about our new points-based system for Continuing Professional Development (CPD, “for those in the Ed Biz” (c) Tom Lehrer). This is a big thing for ICR, formalising the system we’ve had for several years, and making it closer in style to the CME points system used by medics to quantify their annual learning. We’ve been told by organisations who’ve been doing this sort of thing for some time that our system is “more sophisticated than most systems we’ve seen”, giving different values for attending different types of training, personal study etc.
The interview is also something of a big thing for ICR, and particularly for Clinical Research focus. Not so much for the interview itself (in the past, Sue has written plenty of articles for CRfocus), but as a pilot for my new model of doing interviews. For several years now, CRfocus has featured interviews with key people in the clinical research sector, from Richard Tiner (Medical Director of the ABPI) to Frank Wells (mostly appearing under an EFGCP banner these days, but with over 40 years’ pedigree in clinical research) and last month’s interviewee was Irene Norstedt (who runs the Innovative Medicines Initiative for the European Commission).
But these interviews have all be done in writing; this gives me time to craft a set of balanced and suitably incisive questions, and gives the interviewee the opportunity to polish their answers. But it does limit the scope of the interview a little, rather than letting me dig into topics I hadn’t quite expected when I wrote the questions. So, the new format will be to record 30 minutes or so of semi-structured conversation, then transcribe the “best bits” to give a page or two of written interview for CRfocus. The pleasant by-product of this is that we’ll be able to put a (slightly tidied) version of the audio up on the CRfocus Expanded Online website, to give readers a little bit extra.
At least, that’s the plan – hopefully tonight’s interview will work out… because I’ve got an appointment to interview a “big name” at Pfizer in a few weeks…
