News

The journal Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences is running a special issue addressing Studies Within A Trial (SWATs) (guest editors Professor Mike Clarke and Dr Adwoa Parker).

The aim of this special issue is to promote the use of SWATs and to report key methodological advances. The journal is inviting submissions from researchers for completed SWATs and SWAT methodology (both quantitative and qualitative). There will be no article processing fees for authors, and articles will be free to access.

The deadline for submission is October 30th, using the following link: Link to Submission. In your cover letter, please state that you are submitting to the SWATs special issue.

A SWAT Reporting Guidelines Template is currently being piloted, and authors are welcome to use it to report their SWATs. This is available at: SWAT Reporting Guidelines Template (scroll down). To provide feedback on the SWAT Reporting Guidelines Template, please email: prometheus-group@york.ac.uk

For any correspondence, queries, or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process, please contact:

Joel Gagnier, Editor-in-Chief: jgagnier@umich.edu
Mike Clarke, Guest Editor (SWATs): m.clarke@qub.ac.uk
Adwoa Parker, Editorial Board Member (SWATs): adwoa.parker@york.ac.uk”
If you need further details or have any questions, please let me know.

What is the Trial Forge SWAT Network?

We’d like to bring groups that do SWATs together into a network, which would be a good way of keeping everyone up to speed with what sort of SWATs people would like to see being done, which SWATs people are doing now and to run seminars where we could discuss issues that are challenging, or just interesting. Some seminars would be just for the network, others could be opened up.

A key player in organizing the network will be the York Trial Forge SWAT Centre at the York Trials unit, together with the Aberdeen Trial Forge Centre.

We’d now like to invite groups to join the Network.

How does a group become a member?

Like all clubs worth joining, there are a few entry requirements:

The group has to have completed at least one SWAT (preferably published), be doing a SWAT right now or interested in doing a SWAT in the near future.
The group has at least two staff who are ‘SWAT researchers’ and who can be the points of contact for network activity.
The group has to be keen on starting at least one new SWAT every year.
The group has to be willing to register its SWATs on the SWAT Repository.
That’s it. The group can be anywhere in the world and working in any trial area.

How do we join the Trial Forge SWAT Network?

Send an email to prometheus-group@york.ac.uk and info@trialforge.org, and we can have a chat.

One way to fill gaps in trial process evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. A while ago, the Health Research Board–Trial Methodology Research Network in Ireland together with Trial Forge produced a 2-page summary of the SWAT guidance that we published in Trials (see Trial Forge SWAT guidance).

The 2-page summary is now also available in German, have a look at this document in German.

Vielen Dank to Susanne Döpfmer, at the Institute of General Practice, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, for doing the translation.

Randomised trials are a central component of all evidence-informed health care systems and the evidence coming from them helps to support health care users, health professionals and others to make more informed decisions about treatment. The evidence available to trialists to support decisions on design, conduct and reporting of randomised trials is, however, sparse.

One way to fill gaps in evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. At some point, increasing SWAT evidence will lead funders and trialists to ask: given the current body of evidence for a SWAT, do we need a further evaluation in another host trial? This new Trial Forge guidance provides a set of criteria for answering this question. The intention is to avoid SWATs themselves contributing to research waste

We hope the guidance will be useful to trialists, methodologists, funders, approvals agencies and others in making clear when a new evaluation of a SWAT intervention is needed and, importantly, when it is no longer a priority.

The guidance is published in Trials (https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-019-3980-5) and is also part of the SWAT guidance package on the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) website (https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/studies-within-a-trial-swat/21512).

ESP2 is now live! See https://w3.abdn.ac.uk/hsru/ESP2/

ESP2 asks the people who set up new trial recruitment sites to use an 8-item checklist to give their predictions of trial site recruitment at the site. We need 1000 site recruitment predictions and it would be fantastic if you and your colleagues could get involved. Everything is done online through the ESP2 website.

Trial Forge has teamed up with the UK Trial Managers’ Network (UKTMN) to do ESP2, which is the much bigger follow-on study to the original ESP project published in the journal Trials. The new guided prediction form from the first project is at the heart of ESP2.

See the ESP2 website for more details and the resources below.

Resources

Key facts slides set as Powerpoint and pdf.
A5 flyer on ESP2.