LAUSR

I have a personal and professional interest in this study, with 21 years as a clinical research nurse (CRN) and latterly 7 years as a clinical research nurse manager, overseeing more than 60 clinical research staff a large health organisation in Scotland. This study, using the Clinical Research Nursing Domain of Practice (Bevans et al., 2011)-validated framework, aimed to describe global characteristics of the current CRN role, in areas including practice settings, geographic locations, the nature, scope and type of work undertaken and job titles. This research team set out to determine differences in CRNs ’ most frequently performed activities, and to determine if these activities are re fl ective of those previously described in the literature. The title suggests a global study and the authors acknowledge the comparatively small sample size for this ambition; however, it is in fact limited to being a UK/USA comparative study. Although the ‘ snowball ’ recruitment strategy initiated by the International Association of Clinical Research Nursing (IACRN) attempted to include CRNs across North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, China and Taiwan, this was largely unsuccessful and resulted in this aspect of study aims being unful fi lled. Instead of assessing the global direction of the CRN role, the results present fi ndings for two Western countries with relatively well-developed CRN workforces. From this, the authors have attempted to draw global conclusions from the UK/USA data. Furthermore with only 50 responses from the UK, I have concerns about how representative this is of the current workforce; a recent unpublished scoping exercise has identi fi ed a minimum of 7500 research nurses in the UK (Whitehouse, 2021). One distinction between the UK and USA sample was that UK CRNs appear to be more actively involved in recruiting patients/subjects into studies. This is worthy of more detailed examination. In the UK,