Teaching statistics to clinical research staff in a pharmaceutical company.

Education of clinical research staff in understanding statistical concepts is an area of importance for pharmaceutical companies. This understanding is needed to help them communicate with statisticians using a common language, in designing clinical trials and interpretation of clinical trial results. Such staff has little time for a one-semester or even a one-week continuing education course in statistics. Faced with this reality, we developed a 3-module course,for a total of 1.5 days, which was taught over a period of one month that addresses the needs of this audience. We describe the format and content of the course and provide references that can serve as a resource for teaching such a course.