Personas Project Expanding to Benefit Translational Workforce
For the past two years, a collaborative multi-site team led by Northwestern’s Galter Health Sciences Library and the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute has worked to better define specific roles within the translational workforce, establish a set of personas to reflect those roles, construct a portfolio of these persona profiles, and disseminate broadly.
In 2019, the team published a collection of 14 clinical and translational science (CTS) Persona profiles covering a range of CTS roles, including two patient personas. The effort was funded by the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H). These one-page documents outline the key motivators, goals, pain points, needs, and software usage of a wide variety of people in CTS in order to serve as a key background to inform software development projects, as well as development of educational and communication initiatives to serve this audience. This work was described in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science and materials were disseminated via a project site.
“The Personas team has been thrilled with the response from the CTS community, who have reached out to share how they have applied these Personas in their work and to request additional roles,” says Sara Gonzales, Data Librarian at Galter. “Building on the success of our first effort, we are happy to announce the expansion of the Personas project with the creation of six new roles.”
The expanded Personas portfolio will further support development and application of more robust resources and services in Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs, academic research settings, and communities.
Galter is leading the renewed effort in partnership with librarians from NYU Langone Health, Health Sciences Library, Oregon Health & Science University Library, and the University of Virginia Health System, all of whom actively collaborate on a wide range of activities with their translational sciences institutes.
Situated within NUCATS, Galter is the only health services library embedded within a CTSA hub. NUCATS is supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Grant Number UL1TR001422.
Please share your thoughts through this REDCap survey before August 20 to help the Personas team determine the next CTS roles for one-page Persona profiles.
The Proposing New Personas Survey research study (NU: STU00213456, PI Sara Gonzales, MLIS) is a survey for all U.S. adults 18+ currently working in clinical and translational science. Participants will not be compensated. For questions, please contact Sara Gonzales at sara.gonzales2@northwestern.edu.
Gonzales S, O'Keefe L, Gutzman K, Viger G, Wescott AB, Farrow B, Heath AP, Kim MC, Taylor D, Champieux R, Yen PY, Holmes K. Personas for the translational workforce. J Clin Transl Sci. 2020 Jan 10;4(4):286-293. doi: 10.1017/cts.2020.2. PMID: 33244408; PMCID: PMC7681142.
