Tayside Medical Science Centre (TASC) Quality Assurance & Monitoring Update

During 2014, individual QA Managers from Tayside (TASC), Lothian (ACCORD), Grampian R&D Office and Glasgow (GGC and CRUK) met to form the Scottish Academic Research QA Group (SARQAG) with a view to sharing good practice and methodologies with each other.  QA Managers perform a specialised role involving the audit of clinical research processes, facilities, laboratories and studies to ensure that Good Clinical Practice standards are continually met.  Their role involves the management of their institute’s policies and SOPs and the preparation of a wide variety of checklists, action plans and audit reports to further ensure compliance with local and national guidelines and regulations.

Since 2014, membership of SARQAG has expanded to include QA Managers from other centres, including Newcastle, thus changing its name to the National Academic Research QA Group (NARQAG).  NARQAG meets 3 times per year with Dr Valerie Godfrey (TASC) being the Chair for 2017.  Attending QA related conferences and symposiums can be expensive and a benefit for the group is the ability to cover attendance at different events and providing feedback to those who were not there.  Also, in 2016, NARQAG organised a 2-day tailor-made Auditing Skills Course for members in order to gain more knowledge and to a certain extent, streamline their techniques.  It was agreed that this training was a great success and completely fitting to the group’s requirements.

Aside from the very obvious benefit of meeting and sharing information between colleagues performing similar roles, the facilitation of networking outside of the meeting format has proved to be very useful.  Each group’s objectives are similar ie to share best practice, feedback from courses and conferences, network, share experiences from MHRA inspections and facilitate training sessions.  We look forward to more interesting sessions in the future with rotation of the meeting location on a fair basis to ensure all centres have an opportunity to host.