Donor Specialist

Title:

Belong. Connect. Grow. With K

K  is seeking a Donor Specialist to support our SPARC Program for K ’s Science and Space division. The SPARC program (Service Personnel Advancing Research on CTE) seeks to:
1) Provide education to service members, veterans, and their families on brain donation;
2) Register individuals for participation in the Brain Donation Awareness Registry; and
3) Recover whole specimens, process, and prepare for shipping using appropriate methods. The goal of this program is to support research that is ongoing at the Uniformed Services University’s Brain Tissue Repository related to military brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
This is an onsite position, rotating between various partner locations each day.

The Donor Specialist will be on-call on a rotating and regular basis and must be available to work nights, weekends, and holidays with previously scheduled on-call shifts.

The preponderance of duties and work time of the Peer Family Educator will be focused on:

• Approaching and educating medically competent military members and veterans about the potential to become a brain donor at time of their death, and about the opportunity for them to participate in the Brain Donation Awareness Registry.

• Lead and implement all aspects of community partner engagement, stakeholder coordination, and direct interactions with service members and veterans for assigned commands.

• Establish and support regional community partnership and outreach events initiatives to strengthen engagement efforts
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• Approaching and educating families of potential donors about brain donation at the time of death of their military or veteran family member.

• Serving as the primary point of contact to be notified about potential donors and answering questions from families, healthcare workers, funeral home workers, or individuals who would like to know more about the donation program.

• Screening donors, registering study participants, and coordinating with local coroners, medical examiners, tissue transport providers, to facilitate brain donation for research.

• Collaborating with Peer/Family Educators on recruitment activities.

• Performing this work under general supervision where discretion is required, such as in the homes of military members, veterans, and their family members; in the rooms of patients in healthcare facilities; and in funeral homes.

On an as needed basis, ancillary duties in tissue recovery will also be performed. Such tissue recovery duties will generally be performed in mortuaries, funeral homes, medical examiner’s facilities, and healthcare facilities. The Peer Family Educator may perform such duties in a solo role with no direct onsite supervision. Examples of duties will typically include:

• Verifying donor identity

• Reviewing next of kin consent and chain of custody documentation

• Assisting local dieners, coroners, and pathologists with donated specimens

• Completion of documents and records for each donation

• Sectioning and processing the tissue according to the protocols of the project

• Preparing the specimens for shipping

• Coordinating the transport of the body following tissue recovery.

• Protecting the rights and welfare of all human research participants involved in research in accordance with federal regulations and sponsoring agency policies and procedures

• Adhering to and supporting all Federal regulations and DoD policies and procedures instituted to safeguard protected health information (PHI)

• Assuring that all key personnel involved in human research have completed the required education for the protection of human research participants

• Developing materials and tools necessary to appropriately train individuals involved in the conduct of the study around issues related to (but not limited to) protocol requirements, schedule of visits, execution of research plan

• Attending investigator meetings as required or requested

• Preparing other study materials as requested, including but not limited to, informed consent document, case report forms (CRFs), enrollment logs, and study data

• Assuring that the study complies with all terms and conditions

• Coordinating participant…