Principal investigator: Dr. Claudia Pitzer
Core Facilities are in the global trend and provide access to sophisticated technologies. These community facilities and resource centers are now established not only at most universities in Germany, but also in all countries where active research is conducted. The joint use of human and technical resources as well as the central structure of the necessary methodological expertise has become indispensable due to the further specialization. Core Facilities are therefore part of a modern research infrastructure and contribute significantly to the success of research. On the one hand, they offer the working groups direct access to new, state-of-the-art applications and methods, and on the other hand, they guarantee the effective use of resources on the basis of appropriate usage and management concepts.
There are two key conceptual models of the Core Facility in use today. On the one hand there are the “full-service” facilities where scientists only give their samples and get the result back. On the other hand, there are the user laboratories where scientists can use the provided equipment of the Core Facility. In both cases, and in particular for the latter model, a critical problem has arisen which currently has no generally accepted solution and this is the subject of the proposed Q-CoFa project: Complex data management at the interface between the core facility and scientific laboratories complicates the flow of information between the parties involved and jeopardizes the quality of research data obtained.
The DZHW supports this project with its competences in evidence based research methods and translation in (bio)medicine. The DZHW is project partner of INBC and PAASP and offers support in implementation of empirical surveys in this research project.
Find more about the project and its members:
https://www.wihoforschung.de/de/q-cofa-2696.php
http://www.quality-in-core-facilities.org
