This book was written over a period of years, in the cracks between trials, in the hours after the inbox had been processed, on Sundays when the body would not cooperate with the request for rest. It was not written to a deadline. It was written because no one wrote it for me when I needed it, and because I came to believe, slowly, that no one was going to.
I have been a clinical research coordinator for five years. I have worked at academic centers and at private sites. I have run trials in oncology and cardiology and metabolic disease and one rare-disease trial that ended badly for reasons that were no one's fault and everyone's. I have been the person on the phone with a sponsor's medical monitor at eleven at night, trying to explain a deviation in language that would not end my PI's career. I have sat with patients who were dying and held the consent form in my lap because we had not yet started the part of the visit where the form mattered.
I am not, by any meaningful measure, an expert. I am a person who has done this work for long enough to have made most of the mistakes once, some of them twice, and a few of them as recently as last month. The essays in this book are not a summary of what I have learned. They are a record of the gap between what I was taught and what the work turned out to require, which is a different thing entirely.
This is not a manual. The book will not teach you the work. It will tell you that you are not the only one having the experience, and it will give you a vocabulary for what you are experiencing, which is half of what you need. The other half you will assemble for yourself, in the way the coordinators who came before you assembled it for themselves, which is also half of what this book is about.
Names, patients, colleagues, and institutions are composites. The events happened. The arrangement is a fiction. The lessons are not composites. The lessons are the only true things in the book.
I publish under the name Ish. There is no other name. The work is the work, and signing it more thoroughly than that would only invite the institution to attach it to me in ways that the work itself argues against. If you want to find me, you can write to hello@thecoordinatorbook.com. I read every email. I do not answer every email. The ones I answer are the ones from coordinators who are in the middle of something I recognize.
If you are a coordinator and this book has been handed to you in place of training, I am sorry. The book is not training. The book is what someone wrote after.