Improving global health clinical trials – where to begin?

In the UK, the top three priorities in research methodologies for clinical trials have been identified as boosting recruitment, retention of participants and choosing outcomes to collect. But are these priorities the same in the rest of the world? In an effort to explore this, research published today in Trials surveyed researchers who have experience in trials in low to middle income countries.
 
The authors Anna Rosala-Hallas and Mona Nasser discuss the results of the paper in this blog post on the Bio Med Central (BMC) blog (click to read).
 
Here's an extract:
 
Randomized clinical trials, the ‘gold standard’ tool for assessing the effectiveness of treatments, are a challenging, time-consuming and expensive undertaking.
 
To develop trials that yield robust and reliable results, thus maximizing the benefits of the research, much care ought to be applied throughout the process, in designing, conducting, analyzing and reporting the outcomes of the trial; this requires a continuous process improvement policy, in which research methodologies are examined and updated where necessary.
 
The continuous improvement needs to be informed by specific research projects (methodological projects) that focus on testing different approaches to improve trials.
 
In the context of global health clinical trials, the question that immediately springs to mind is whether the priorities in the UK hold for the rest of the world.
 
A survey for the purpose of identifying trials research methodology priorities in the UK, i.e. research methodologies requiring re-examination and/or improvement, has named the top three UK priorities as: “How to boost recruitment”, “How to keep participants in the trial once they have been recruited”, and “How to choose which outcomes to collect”. Continue Reading
 
To read the paper CLICK HERE
 
Source: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-medicine/2018/02/05/improving-global-health-clinical-trials-where-to-begin/
 

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