Building a strong FDA workforce to bring scientific advances to patients

By: Scott Gottlieb, M.D. The key to FDA’s public health mission, and its ability to bring innovative new therapies to patients, is the technical, scientific, and clinical expertise of its people. As the products that we’re asked to review become more complex and specialized, so do the technical demands on our workforce. Our staff must remain current with the dramatic advances in science and medicine and meet the increasing demands that globalization and other trends place on our core consumer protection functions. As a result, FDA continually faces the challenges related to building and maintaining a diverse, talented, and dedicated professional workforce. However, we’re committed to doing what’s necessary to tackle these challenges and maintain a strong FDA — one that attracts and preserves world-class talent. Most recently, I’ve requested a comprehensive effort to evaluate our hiring practices and procedures. We know that our traditional approach to recruiting and hiring is not as efficient as it should be to attract, hire, and retain the types of experts we need now and anticipate to need over the longer term. What’s more, we’re increasingly competing with better-resourced entities in the private sector for the same limited pool of people with very specific clinical and scientific skills and training. These are challenges that our current approach to hiring did not anticipate. It’s critical that we modernize the process for recruiting personnel into these...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Blog FDA Voice Source Type: news