39 - The Value of Virtual Office Hours

Background: Fall semester 2019, the a University's HRPP began offering in person office hours once a month at the library on one of their campus' and at the Biomedical Research Institute. This service was needed, but very few researchers took advantage of it.

Program

Description: In March 2020, the HRPP staff began working remotely full-time due to COVID-19. To continue to support our researchers, we transitioned from the drop-in booth held at multiple locations to Virtual Office Hours using Zoom. These were held every week for three hours and were staffed by two HRPP Protocol Coordinators (PCs) on a rotating basis. Researchers received assistance on a first come first serve basis, and no appointments were needed. If more than one researcher needed assistance, we used the waiting room and breakout room features in Zoom to manage multiple consultations and maintain privacy. Document sharing and the annotate tools proved to be useful in providing step-by-step guidance in real time. During the down time, PCs continued to work on their regular tasks and assignments. This format made it easy to transition back to assisting researchers. The number of consultations was tracked on an Excel spreadsheet.

Program

Assessment: As awareness of Virtual Office Hours has increased, the number of virtual drop-ins has steadily increased each year while the number of individual consultations has decreased. During the 2020-2021 academic year, we had 53 researchers attend virtual office hours compared to 131 during the 2022-2023 academic year. In comparison, during those same times, we had 188 and 61 individual consultations, respectively. We have also seen a decrease in the average number of days to approve new protocol submissions. During the 2020-2021 academic year, our average was 23.6 days in comparison to 14.2 days in the 2022-2023 academic year. This could be a result of better-quality submissions because of increased engagement with research.

Researchers have reported that removing the travel barrier has increased their ability to access our staff and support. The HRPP PCs have reported that Virtual Office Hours have allowed for flexibility and access to resources that were not possible with in-person office hours. Overall, this new service has been successful and has improved our relationship with the research community.

Limitations: Despite the success of the service, there are a few limitations. Researchers with scheduling conflicts cannot take advantage of this service and must schedule appointments for consultations. Zoom can be difficult and sometimes impossible to use when the internet is unstable. This is more common when users are off campus or in remote areas with unreliable internet. Users that frequently experience connectivity issues may find it easier to schedule in-person or phone consultations.

Discussion: This is a low-cost investment that leverages existing resources. It has been easy to implement and has improved our relationship with the research community. The quality of our submissions has improved as well as our review times. We plan to continue offering this service and to implement a customer satisfaction survey to identify ways we can continue to improve. Small programs that do not have enough staff or programs that are trying to find ways to improve their outreach could benefit from offering this service. Offering this service can help a program build trust and credibility among researchers.