Hannah Reay and Jackie Sears outline how a regional educational structure offers colleagues access to a broad range of ‘in-house’ courses across organisational boundaries and a forum for sharing resources and best practice

The challenges of meeting the learning needs of clinical research staff are shared by managers of many groups of specialist practitioners. Such specialists tend, for example, to be few in number, come from a variety of disciplines, have a diversity of roles and work across several organisations or locations in relative isolation. This article gives an overview of a regional training initiative, the Birmingham region Research Training Collaborative, for clinical research staff, and describes how it provides reciprocal access to research-related training across organisational boundaries as well as being a forum where learning resources and events can be shared. It describes the benefits and challenges of this initiative and highlights the main elements of success.