- Posted By: Vicki Barber
This week I attended the MRC North West Hub for Trials Methodology Research Day entitled ‘Improving Trials by Improving Trials for Patients’ https://twitter.com/hashtag/Improvingtrials?src=hash where you will find tweets from the day and subsequent related tweets.
A day headlined by a presentation by Professor Kay Dickersin, the Director for the Centre for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis at John Hopkins in the US. Kay gave a talk of some of the keynote work that has been undertaken in the US in this topic. Kay highlighted Consumers United for Evidence-Based Healthcare (CUE) (http://us.cochrane.org/CUE) that has some wonderful resources including some free online courses offered by the US Cochrane Centre.
Peter Bower, gave some initial results of the MRC START programme and the hopes for work in MRC START 2 programme, and encouraged us all to consider SWATs (Studies within a trial).
Kerry Woolfall reported on work that have explored parent and practitioner perceptions and experiences of deferred consent in children’s clinical trials. This has led to the CONNECT guidance which has been developed to assist in the design, review and conduct of clinical trials investigating the emergency treatment of children (under 16 years of age) with life-threatening conditions. http://www.liv.ac.uk/psychology-health-and-society/research/connect/
Recent papers/reports highlighted on the day included:
Does offering an incentive payment improve recruitment to clinical trials and increase the proportion of socially deprived and elderly participants? Jennings et al 2015, Trials http://www.trialsjournal.com/content/16/1/80
Going the Extra Mile – a strategic review of public involvement in the National Institute for Health Research
http://www.nihr.ac.uk/get-involved/Extra%20Mile2.pdf
Patient and public involvement in the early stages of clinical trial development: a systematic cohort investigation. Gamble et al 2014, BMJ Open
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/7/e005234.full.pdf+html?sid=c3b56fd5-20...
From plans to actions in patient and public involvement: qualitative study of documented plans and the accounts of researchers and patients sampled from a cohort of clinical trials. Buck et al 2014, BMJ Open
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/12/e006400.full.pdf+html?sid=61168e83-8...