Director, Patient Recruitment

at  AstraZeneca

We are transforming care for billions of people living with chronic diseases. Our ambition is to intervene earlier to protect vital organs, slow or reverse disease progression, and achieve remission for these often degenerative, debilitating, and life-threatening conditions. So many more people can live better, healthier lives.
BioPharmaceuticals Clinical Operations is a diverse, international team focused on the end-to-end planning and delivery of patient-centric clinical trial programs and studies, enabling submissions for the BioPharmaceuticals and Oncology portfolios. We work throughout the clinical lifecycle and leverage our expertise to design and deliver sustainable trials with short clinical cycle times and an excellent patient experience. We believe diversity and inclusion strengthen our workforce and add value to our clinical trial programs and studies.
The Director, Patient Recruitment is responsible for leading, developing, and supporting both non-digital and digital patient recruitment efforts for their therapeutic area. They work in partnership with the Executive Director Recruitment & Clinical Innovation, Therapeutic Areas (Early, Late, and Commercial) and Site Management & Monitoring to develop therapeutically aligned strategy. The focus is on enhancing the deployment and monitoring of recruitment capabilities, ensuring consistency in approach within disease areas/indications, improving recruitment and retention of diverse patients in clinical trials and improving predictability of delivery across Therapeutic Areas (TA).

REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree required, preferably in medical or biological science, or related subject or equivalent qualification or experience.
• Extensive experience in clinical trials recruitment and delivery
• Comprehensive experience of Drug Development process within a pharmaceutical or clinical background
• Proven leadership and ability to engage and empower others in order to accomplish individual, team and organizational objectives
• An understanding of the therapeutic areas related to AstraZeneca’s products
• Strong leadership, problem solving, stakeholder management and conflict resolution skills
• Strong project management skills
• Ability to lead change with a positive approach to the challenges of change for self, team, and the business. Sees change as an opportunity to improve performance and add value to the business
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, negotiation, collaboration and interpersonal skills

• Work with Therapeutic Areas Teams to establish therapeutic and indication-level recruitment strategies
• Align innovative recruitment methods with disease and indication-level strategies, encompassing both non-digital and digital products and services
• Coordinate program/study specific recruitment planning and solutions between all involved functions including TA, SM, and SMM, Evinova, Alliance Management, Procurement, R&D IT, DS&AI, PI&S and Medical Affairs during study planning. Create central guidance for program teams to identify established global and local solutions based on program specific recruitment needs. Provide centralized skills and capabilities to improve deployment.
• Monitor effectiveness of deployed recruitment solutions across studies, across indications, across geographies. Assess gaps in established solutions and partnerships. Identify and address gaps. This includes tracking and measuring the number of patients globally recruited through these methods and continuously improving the conversion channel year-on-year
• Ensure efficient implementation of lessons learned across internal and outsourced studies
• Define input for the digital recruitment platform (AZTrials@You) based on coordination with TA, SMM, Medical Affairs, Commercial
• Lead the strategic planning to identify studies utilizing the digital recruitment platform, determining advertising requirements, and establishing the platform as a long-term recruitment strategy and a sustainable source of patients. Monitor performance and coordinate necessary adjustments for maximum site utilization and patient throughput
• Identify and manage preferred global partners for program teams to engage to increase patient diversity and inclusion in the US and other market
• Define baseline recruitment expectations, accountabilities, and technologies to be used in partnership negotiations with PiCN sites
• Actively manage business risks and issues, supporting teams in finding solutions