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The full CRC track covers 8 courses from study start-up to close-out — the skills sponsors actually look for.
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Clinical Research Coordinator
Full course · Participant Management: Screening to Retention
Free Lesson Preview
The full CRC track covers 8 courses from study start-up to close-out — the skills sponsors actually look for.
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Document contact attempts systematically, determine when to classify participants as lost to follow-up, navigate the ethical boundary of persistent contact, and manage data quality implications.
Every coordinator knows the feeling. You dial the participant's number for the third time in a week. It rings. And rings. And goes to voicemail — if the mailbox is not already full. You leave a message. You try the alternate number. You send a letter. You wait. And the waiting is the hardest part, because you do not know whether the participant has decided to leave, has simply been too busy to call back, has changed their phone number, has been hospitalized, or has experienced something worse. The silence is ambiguous, and ambiguity is uncomfortable.
Loss to follow-up is, in some ways, the most frustrating participant status a coordinator encounters. Study withdrawal, however difficult, is at least clear: the participant has made a decision, communicated it, and the site knows where it stands. LTFU offers no such clarity. The participant's intent is unknown. The site's obligations continue — you cannot simply shrug and move on — but the likelihood of reestablishing contact diminishes with each unanswered call.
And here is the tension that makes LTFU genuinely difficult from an ethical standpoint: the same persistence that might reestablish contact with a participant who simply forgot about their appointment might constitute harassment of a participant who has silently chosen to withdraw but did not want to have the conversation. You do not know which participant you are dealing with. That uncertainty demands a structured process — one that fulfills the site's obligations to make reasonable contact attempts, documents those attempts thoroughly, and sets a clear endpoint at which the participant is formally classified as lost.
This lesson provides that structure.
What you will learn4 objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
Progress saves itself — finish reading and this lesson completes