Two days in CRA meeting

Last week was a highlight of the project I worked for. During two-days meeting our team had 4 hours time to present our product and train people to use it. It was quite tough to convince some technophobes that our e-diaries are actually easy to use. There were many investigators and monitors from Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, and Norway. During a training session I’ve notice that some of the Spanish investigators actually don’t speak English (or speak it very bad). I tried my best using simple keywords to explain them how the diary works. Hopefully, they will read Spanish manuals at home :)

The meeting was quite interesting as it was a first such meeting for me. But however the best part of the meeting was dinners and outs for a drink. The pharmaceutical company was paying for everything: food in best restaurants and drinks in pubs. The project leader from the pharmaceutical company was keen to go out, so we had a good time. He was nice guy in mid 50ties with very good sense of humour. He told us that most remarkable his CRA meeting was in St. Petersburg with 250 gynecologists from Russia and Baltic states. Yeeh, 250 gynecologists - strange audience.

The experience of my colleges is that the smaller the company the nicer people. Big companies tend to be less personal and more ignorant. For them, you are just another subcontractor. I was lucky with my first project... we will see what's coming next.