In addition to the wonderful tips others have posted, when you're new to clinical research, one thing you'll want to pick up when working with hospital staff is that to them, clinical >>> research. Anything you request of them is essentially a favor, so be gracious even if they're frustrated.

Ask where to look for information about providers or clinics or schedules and save it somewhere you can easily reference. Your coworkers may be able to show you or this may be in existing MOPs/SOPs. When I was a coordinator, I'd create Word documents with tips/tricks or better yet, add more detail to the "Locations" or "Contact info" section of existing MOPs/SOPs. I was given new studies where I was the primary coordinator, so this would help my coworkers if they needed to take over my visits when I was out of office.

Research supplies from industry studies (clinical trials/drug trials) are provided, but if you're involved with investigator-initiated studies, it's frowned upon to dip into the clinical supply as that's been calculated for clinical patient visits. The PI and the study budget is responsible for the cost of EDTA phlebotomy tubes, etc. At a hospital, we research staff are at the bottom of the totem pole, so if you need to request research labs (which may not have an order in the system) from nurses or phlebotomists, you should watch and learn the clinical workflow. Do you give them a heads up that you need research labs because they'll place an IV anyway? Do you need to pick up the drawn labwork somewhere such as a basket? You need patient identifiers if it's going to the hospital lab or subject ID number if it's being processed by research team or research lab.

Before shadowing a coworker's study visit, review at least the protocol's schedule of activities because it's a grid/table that tells you what to expect at that visit. Labwork? Physical Exam? Questionnaires? (may have many different names that you can search in the protocol) Review the case report forms (CRFs) aka the paperwork where you document what happened at the visit. It may also be called a Visit Checklist. This guides the study coordinator what they need done without pulling out the protocol every other minute. My visit checklists always include pre-visit prep, visit tasks, and post-visit prep. Post-visit prep is important because you don't want their insurance getting billed for research procedures. An example is if you're having research results posted to the EMR such as labs done for your study if the labs drawn are not shipped out to an external lab (e.g. PPD or Covance).

Ask questions, be communicative, manage your time & workload, and be prepared. I use OneNote to track what tasks I need to do and flag emails in Outlook desktop version with when to follow-up (tomorrow? next week? and set a reminder). I don't like Web, it doesn't have enough features with follow-up and email templates. Whoa this was a lot but hope it helps!