How to write the "Facilities & other resources"

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Now, as I mentioned yesterday, I just got done writing an average-sized grant, and I had a couple of collaborators work with me as side investigators, and one of the things that came up was the facilities and resources document.

1:27 What I recognize is the document says facilities and other resources, and so it's easy to think about your office space and the computers you have access to, but it really is so much bigger than that. I want to take some time to talk about the facilities and resources document, because I think it's not a document that we are used to writing except in the context of grants, and I want to just share with some insights about how to write that document. Okay. So, the first thing that I want to just draw attention to is that, especially when it comes to NIH grants, your scientific environment is part of your application.

2:10 In a sense, they are asking the question, well, how will you be successful in this work? Does your environment give you access to what is needed to succeed? So we get that you are brilliant scientists, and we get that you have partners who are amazing, and between the three of you, or however many of you are in co-investigators on the grant, you're going to be able to do this excellently. However, will your institution support you to do this work? And it's such an important question, and it's one of the reasons why it is one of the components that can make or break a grant, right, because you can score well everywhere across the board, but when it comes to the environment, then people say, oh, no, not a great environment, because they're not sure that you're going to be a resource to do the work well.

3:00 They're not even sure if you're supported to do the work well. Here's the deal, especially when you're submitting for NIH awards, but to be honest, really all proposals is that the proposal is really submitted by the institution, not by you. It's submitted by the institution, because the institution is the one guaranteeing this work is going to be done. For that reason, institutions do get to say, hey, we're not going to submit this grant, because it doesn't meet our institutional standards. And so you have to be aware of that, that even though you are the investigator who is doing the bulk of the work, your institution is actually responsible for the submission of the grant.

3:41 You, when you submit it, are submitting it as their agent. And then when the money comes, the money doesn't come to you as an individual, it comes to your institution. And they give you some of it according to the budget that you have decided, and depending on what the funding agency is, they keep back some for themselves so that they can continue to support you in an amazing environment that allows you to do this great work. Okay, for this reason, when you are submitting a grant and you're thinking about describing the facilities and resources, it's not just the facilities and resources that are immediately available to you within the enclosed space of your division.

4:25 It really is about the facilities and resources available throughout the institution that you can leverage to do your work well. It's about the facilities and resources available to you throughout your institution that you can leverage to do your work well. For this reason, you're going to want a lot of pages. If you are going to do this work justice, you're going to need a lot of pages to put it together. And so what are the components of the facilities and other resources? Okay, let's talk about it. So one of the things that's really important when you first set out to write the facilities and other resources document is to actually go back and look at the instructions.

5:13 And this is really a theme in terms of writing any proposal. You've really got to go back to the instructions, and one thing that's easy to do is just to take somebody else's facilities and other resources document and just use it to create your own, especially when you're from the same institution. And that's okay, and it's easy enough to do, but you do want to make sure that you are up to date on the latest instructions. And really, in general, NIH does tend to change their instructions over time. Sometimes those changes are small and subtle, sometimes they're major, but over time, there's change in the way these documents are presented. And so you just want to make sure by looking at the most recent documents that you are actually using the guidelines that are relevant to the current submission.

6:04 And so I always recommend going to the document called the SF-424. You'll find it on grants.nih.gov, and you have a chance to really look within that document. So search for facilities and other resources and find it and find what they say. And so what they're asking, and I'm actually reading verbatim now from the instructions from the most recent SF-424 as of this recording, is that they want you to describe how the scientific environment in which the research will be done contributes to the probability of success. So describe how the scientific environment in which the research will be done contributes to the probability of success.

6:48 So institutional support, physical resources, and intellectual rapport. Okay, and in describing the scientific environment in which the work will be done, discuss ways in which the proposed studies will benefit from unique features of the scientific environment or from unique subject populations or how studies will employ useful collaborative agreements. Okay, and if there are multiple performance sites, describe the resources available at each site. Okay, so I've given you the instructions. I've literally read verbatim from the actual instructions. So it's three components, right? Number one, it's, okay, describe the scientific environment, right?

7:30 Talk about what's the institutional support, what are the physical resources, what's the intellectual rapport. And if you're an LE stage investigator, they actually are asking for a little bit more. They're saying, hey, talk about your resources for class traveler training. Talk about the collegial support. Talk about logistical support. Talk about financial support, such as protected time for research with salary support. So there are a couple of things that you can put in there and really, really build this document as much as possible. Okay. So number one, you want to really go and read the instructions and make sure that you understand everything that needs to be in there. And as I talked about with yesterday's episode, is you do want to get an example of what one looks like.

8:13 And it's so helpful. This is one of the things, this is one of the documents in which I will say, before you ever start writing, you should get somebody's example, because it will save you so much time. People are putting these documents together all the time. Your institution probably has some boilerplate language available at different, available in your institutional intranet. It's out there. So do not, this is the one document you never want to create from scratch. You want to borrow heavily from as many other people at your institution who've put documents like this together. Your mentors will be able to help you with that. Okay. So the first step is really to understand what's required.

8:53 And then the next step is to borrow from somebody and say, hey, you've put this together before. And I see what you've put together. And borrow from a couple of people, right? You're all at your one institution, but you get to see how they've all described the institutional environment that you have. And so the two components of this description, you're going to list these facilities, you're going to list these resources, but then you're also going to put a little bit of a blurb about how you're going to benefit, how this project specifically is going to benefit you, how this resource is going to benefit you with regard to this specific project. So that's why it's not enough to just simply list pages and pages and pages of all the amazing things you have available to you at your institution, but you actually want to be able to write a little bit in there as far as how this resource will benefit you.

9:46 And for me, what I do is I write a few lines at the end of each big paragraph of a description of a resource, and I'll say, for this project, we're going to use the library to do X, Y, Z. Yes, the library should be part of your facilities and resources document because, you know, so much goodness happens in the library that's relevant to you in your scientific career and certainly in your research projects. But then you're going to list the resource, list all the wonderful things about it, and then you're going to have a line or two for how it will benefit your research team. For example, another example is that you're part of the Department of Medicine, for example.

10:26 Okay, this investigator and the co-investigator, they are faculty members in the Department of Medicine, those kinds of things. So you always want for, and you don't have to do this for every resource you mention, but for key resource that are directly relevant to your proposal, you do want to do that. And what you do is you give the reviewers a sense of you're not just listing all these things, but they actually are relevant to your proposal as well. So you want to know the instructions, you want to see what somebody else has put together, and then you want to go ahead and make sure that for every category, you are copy, you are tailoring it specifically to your research project and why this resource is helping you as well.

11:13 Okay, all right. Now another thing that you want to do is to actually go through and read the text and make sure it makes sense. And the reason being that many of these documents are boilerplate documents. So for the most part, you can create one yourself from scratch, just going around to institutional website and web pages and pretty much copying and pasting a lot of the things they say as a starting point. But then you really do want to kind of paraphrase and make it more tailored to your work. But what you want to do is make sure that you are not just writing out what all of it is without actually reading to make sure that it's understandable to your average reader.

12:02 And I will tell you that this is not one of the documents necessarily when you give in the grand scheme of your entire document that you want to spend so much time on, but you do want to spend enough time on it. You want to make sure that your writing is clear. Because I think what tends to happen is that people just copy paste stuff off of websites and they're not really asking, hey, does it make sense? Is this the language we want to use? Is this the way in which we want to present the data? You want to make sure that you do that. And so do spend some time working on it and making sure that the language is accessible to the reviewers as well. And then another thing that you want to do, and I think this is important in general for your entire grant, is to make sure it looks good.

12:50 Make sure it looks nice. It's formatted well. It's justified edges if you believe in justification for grant applications. And if you don't, it's okay. But you want to make sure that when you look at it, it looks good. Because although it's not necessarily one of the biggest components of the application, kind of like the research strategy is, it is a component of the application that allows the reviewers to judge your sense of organization. So wow, this is an organized team. They've really done a great job with the facilities and other resources. And it just speaks to the quality of your work in general. The quality of your project, of the paper, or the document before them is the only way they can really use to judge you as an investigator.

13:37 And should they be judging you? I don't know. But let's say they're judging your work. And really, it's an extension of the work you do. And so you want to make sure that it presents you in the best possible light. So you definitely want to take time to make sure that not just the content is important, not just the format is good, but also making sure that it actually delivers and looks good as well. Okay, so that's that. The other piece that became really relevant to me in the story I shared earlier, the other thing that becomes really relevant to me in the story I shared earlier is that you may be an investigator who has other sites as part of your collaborative work.

14:25 And you need to present their facilities and resources in addition to your own. That would be easier and nice and straightforward as if they would just put theirs together and then send it to you. But what happens if they do not have it? If they've never written one, they're not sure exactly what to put in it. What exactly do you do? Do you start going to different website links to try to create something from scratch for them? Only as an absolute last resort. What you want to do is you want to ask them to check in with their CTSA if they have one or research hub and ask if they have access to documents like this that have been created before.

15:12 Again, these are documents that other people are creating all the time. You never really want to start this one from scratch on your own. And so if that investigator has never done this before, and because you are the one submitting the grant and you care how everything comes together, you want to ask them and just point them to potential resources that could give them the answer to this question. And so is their library able to help them? Is there a grants office that may already have compiled this data? Is there an intranet site that they just need to link to? Okay. So what if all that fails and they're like, I'm sorry, this is all I got for you?

15:52 You now want to start to leverage your connections. You want to leverage your connections and make sure that you are able to find somebody at that institution who maybe has submitted a grant recently. So for this particular recent application, that's what I did. I reached out to someone I had met in the course of recording this podcast and I said, hey, have you submitted a facilities and resources document recently? Because I have somebody else who needs to submit one with me and I don't want to start from scratch. And people are so gracious. They're so awesome. And you're not asking them to create a new document just for you. You're just saying, hey, you probably already have access to this document.

16:33 Would you please share it with me? And they are happy to do that. And so that was a great starting point for me, was getting all this information already from somebody so at least I had a starting template. And then I went through their website and I thought about what other resources are going to be important to put on this particular in this document. And I did that like the CTSA or the clinical information, the university information, those kinds of details. And so I added them. And so eventually this particular investigator, their group was able to create a document for me and I actually was able to add to what I already had. So I didn't get rid of mine in favor of theirs.

17:15 I just was able to add it to what I'd already pulled together from both the prior investigator sending me the document and also what I had been able to glean by myself on the website. And some of the stuff I had I liked better compared to some of the stuff that they were giving me. But at the end of the day, I got all the information I needed and was able to put together the facilities and other resources document. I think the final thing that I want to share about the facilities and other resources document is that you get to make it your own. You do. You get to really, really tailor it and recognize that you're going to use this again. You're going to use this document again.

17:55 So it is worth the first time you write it, putting in a lot of effort into it so that it is something that you can use again the next time without thinking too, too, too, too critically about doing it. So you want to make sure that you really create one that's as amazing as possible the first go around. Now, invariably, the first time you're submitting a grant, you're just overwhelmed, just trying to get it finished. And you might not think so hard about putting together the facilities and other resources document. But when you can, and to the greatest extent that you can, you really do want to spend time here. Because that's one of the things that I think is so awesome is that you can put, there's no page limits.

18:37 Especially when you're submitting for an NIH grant, there are no page limits to the facilities and other resources. And so you can list everything in there to the greatest extent that you want. And what NIH doesn't want you to do is to use pages to circumvent other page limits. But what you can do is add a little bit of information in the research strategy about this resource, and then have in parenthesis C facilities and other resources so that they can know to go there for more detailed information. For example, you're making use of a multi-institutional network. That's a resource. You're going to put that in the facilities and other resources, and you're going to really describe it in great detail.

19:22 But when it comes to your actual research strategy, you're going to want to mention it, but you're not going to be able to go into that level of detail because of the space constraints. But what you do is to summarize it on a high level for the way it makes sense in the research strategy, and then you're going to put in parenthesis C facilities and other resources so that reviewers know to go there to look for more information. So the facilities and other resources document is an important component of every grant. And sometimes it gets a little bit of bad press because it doesn't seem to be as important. Or I should say it gets short-shrifted. I think that's the term I have in my mind, short-shrifted, because it does not kind of carry the same weight as, say, the research strategy or perhaps the specific aims.

20:12 But it's really a great resource for you to be able to put in all the information that couldn't fit in the strategy and to a great detail. And it's also an opportunity to really showcase to the reviewers that your team has got it together. And third, and actually probably the most important reason to pull it together is because it shows to the reviewers what kind of institutional environment you are housed in. And it helps them feel confident and secure that your great team has a great environment in which to do this work. And you want to make sure that as you present that, you don't spare any expense. You make sure they know about all possible resources that are relevant to you at your institution.

21:00 Now, one of the questions that will come up is that, well, why not just put every potential resource? Like, it doesn't have to count. It doesn't have to matter. And I would say really, you can put whatever resource you want. It is helpful that you put resources that are relevant to your research. And so what might those resources be? Number one, the school of the university, right? Your institution exists within the confines of a university for many of us. And for some of us, perhaps that's not the case. And so putting information about your university, how long has the institution been established, all the host of detail, is important because even though you may not consider the university as such a big deal, I mean, it's the home.

21:45 It's the home in which you live. And so it's important that that's in there as well. So you want to write about the university, all hospital and healthcare settings that you have access to do your research in or recruit subjects for your research or to get specimens for your research, all of that should be in there. All core facilities that are relevant to your research, even if you have a biostatistical team, there's a core facility that's actually supposed to supply biostatisticians. You should put that in there. Every possible thing you can think of, including your IRB, including your library, including maybe even the physician's lounge.

22:25 Actually, to be honest, I've never seen the physician's lounge and the facilities and other resources, but you could make that work. Absolutely, you could make that work. If to say that not only does our institution care about our research well-being, they care that we actually get some rest and relaxation. I mean, actually, now I'm thinking about it, I should probably put that in my next grant. But anyway, I think I say that to make a point that if it helps you move your research forward, it should be in the facilities and other resources document. Okay, now I will tell you that I really just share my perspective. As you know, there are many different perspectives as far as completing the facilities and other resources.

23:06 I'm curious to hear your thoughts. If you are brave enough, bold enough to be willing to share, I invite you to come to our podcast website, clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. That's clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. And go ahead and leave us a voicemail and say, hey, what you talked about today, I actually have other ideas about how to do those facilities and other resources documents. And then share. And I would love to take your voicemail and create it into another episode for our future listeners. Okay, that's all I have for today. I want to thank you so much for listening. And I look forward to listening and talking with you again the next time.

23:55 Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.