Residents as CO-PI's?

[FireBug]

Our hospital recently switched from allowing residents and fellows to hold Co-PI status on prospective studies to making it far more restrictive. I'm trying to figure out what's the norm at other institutions. Any anecdotes or inside knowledge would be much appreciated especially for those out there who have been or know someone at their institution who recently served/is serving as Co-PI.

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[Chartreuse Wombat]

I am a large, research-intensive medical school. Residents cannot be a PI (or co-PI). I think this is the norm.

 

[Chartreuse Wombat]

I am a large, research-intensive medical school. Residents cannot be a PI (or co-PI). I think this is the norm.

Quick Google search and Emory, Penn, Dartmouth (just the first three on the list) all exclude trainees as PIs.

 

[kd2]

I am the PI of a prospective trial that I wrote. Residents at my institution are allowed to be PI as long as they have a faculty sponsor.

 

[Palex80]

In Europe it's fully acceptable for a resident to be a PI in a prospective trial. Both in trials initiated by them (as coordinating investigators) and in trials where a site is participating in (as local PIs).

 

[Chartreuse Wombat]

What's the rationale for this?

The rationale is the trainees are not employees of the university, rather of the health system and usually for a period of 5 years or less. The PI is where the buck stops and any problems are ultimately the responsibility of the PI.

Does it matter if you're co-PI or PI or not?

Depends who you ask; authorship and place on author line is probably more important.


I'm not sure if this is true for Penn.

Who can be a PI? | CHOP Institutional Review Board

Looks cut and dry to me.

 

[nkmiami]

Can you imagine the bad optics if something tragic occurred and a resident was the PI?

 

[Dr G Oogle]

I'm at an academic institution and residents and fellows can be PIs. Does it matter though? If there as a manuscript even if you're not technically a PI you can still be a first author, and I dont think you get much mileage from a being of a PI on a study that never gets published, so in the end I think it's just semantics