Keeping Everyone in the Loop Posted on November 21, 2007 Elizabeth L. George (bio) describes personnel challenges that arise in labs.

The other thing that's hard is some of the people on our staff need to be blind to the treatment condition, and so they don't get to come to the lab meetings that we have because we discuss cases there. But then they're out of the loop of communication, and so sometimes they don't know what's going on. And they send mass emails to five or six people including David in England to do something, and you don't know who is going to do this and who isn't going to do this, and how do I make sure it's getting done?

And of course David's like, "Why is this being sent to me?" and it's because the people who are in those roles are actually very conscientious people. They want to make sure that it doesn't fall through the cracks, but sometimes it's hard to make sure everything's running smoothly.

And then transitions. We just lost one of our grad students who's been there for five years who sets the sun. She's just amazing. She's going to the San Diego VA, and she was my safety net. If anything didn't get taken care of, she did it, and so now we're trying to train new people and make sure that everybody's on the same page. And everybody who comes in, of course and it's great, I think it's wonderful, but they have other ideas of how things can be done more efficiently, and you have to say we've been doing this for however many years. And some things can change, but other things probably can't change so much.

And then collaborating. We have a lot of different psychiatrists that we're collaborating with and making sure that we're all discussing cases and everybody knows what's going on. If somebody's not doing well, everybody needs to be in the loop for that, and making sure that there's no splitting that goes on because it's a treatment study, which very rarely happens, because we have really good collaboration between the psychiatrist and the therapist.

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