The INFORM Structured Grant Form for Trials

Go straight to the download: the INFORM Structured Grant Form for Trials.

Funders provide potential grant applicants with a lot of information, however, the only part of the support process that all applicants must comprehensively engage with is the grant application form, which makes its role in improving the future informativeness of trials central to INFORM.

One of INFORM’s Good Practice Actions GPA 4 is to make use of structured design tools, established frameworks, and Open Science practices to improve trial quality, transparency and reproducibility. Examples given in INFORM GPA 4 include SPIRIT, a protocol reporting standard; COMET, an initiative that support core outcomes in trials; and trial pre-registration to improve transparency.

This INFORM finding led to designing a structured grant form for trials that is built around SPIRIT, the protocol reporting standard.

To develop the form the INFORM team took SPIRIT and cross-checked it with INFORM’s 12 good practice actions, many of which aligned. Where an INFORM finding was missing, we added a question, or modified the guidance to a question to make the INFORM requirements more explicit.

The INFORM Structured Grant Form for Trials has 34 questions covering topics such as the rationale for the trial, who the participants are, patient and public involvement, intervention and comparison descriptions, how outcomes were selected, recruitment and retention, analysis, oversight and data sharing. Each question comes with brief guidance that should be sufficient for grant applicants to know what is expected. We think the form will be easier for researchers to complete, and for peer-reviewers and panels to assess, than many existing trial grant application forms because its questions are so focused.  Full and complete answers will often be very short.  

The current form is version 1 because we do anticipate changes over time as more experience is gained from its use, or new evidence comes to light around how to improve the likelihood of an informative trial.

Where use of a trial-specific grant form is not possible for funders, read our [case study] about how Wellcome have worked with the INFORM findings to make important changes to their application process.