The QuinteT Group, University of Bristol, UK
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are fundamental to evidence-based medicine, but often struggle to recruit sufficient patients within their allocated time and budgets. Tackling recruitment issues is a priority for reducing waste in RCT conduct, and vital to ensuring trial evidence becomes available to inform clinical practice in a timely manner.
The University of Bristol’s QuinteT (Qualitative Research Integrated within Trials) research group specialises in supporting RCTs that are considered particularly challenging for recruitment.
ABOUT THE QUINTET GROUP’S PROGRAM OF WORK
RCTs may have difficulties in recruiting for many reasons. Some of these can be especially challenging to overcome, such as clinicians’ equipoise issues and discomfort with suspending their usual practices, patients’ preferences for certain treatments, and complexities in a trial’s design or organisation. Recruitment issues can also be difficult to anticipate or may manifest in an unexpected way, despite trial teams’ best efforts to prevent these.
The Qualitative Research Integrated within Trials (QuinteT) approach uses bespoke methods to rapidly identify and understand the sources of recruitment difficulty in an RCT, and then supports trial teams to overcome these through tailored actions. To date, these approaches have been applied to over 50 RCTs worldwide. The accumulated knowledge and evidence from this ongoing work is continuously informing new training initiatives, and refinements to methods for identifying and addressing trial recruitment issues more efficiently. For more information about the training initiatives and key resources that may be helpful for recruitment, please see the links below. If you would like to discuss collaborating with QuinteT to support recruitment to your trial, please get in touch with us at Carmel.Conefrey@bristol.ac.uk.
There is more information about QuinteT at https://www.bristol.ac.uk/population-health-sciences/research/groups/social-sciences-health/quintet/
Method underpinning the Quintet Recruitment Intervention (QRI)
The QRI
- Optimising recruitment and informed consent in randomised controlled trials: the development and implementation of the Quintet Recruitment Intervention (QRI)
- Pragmatic randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are considered essential to determine effective interventions for routine clinical practice, but many fail to recruit participants efficiently, and some really important RCTs are not undertaken because recruitment is thought to be too difficult. The ‘QuinteT Recruitment Intervention’ (QRI) aims to facilitate informed decision making by patients about RCT participation and to increase recruitment. This paper presents the development and implementation of the QRI.
- Intensive Triangulation of Qualitative Research and Quantitative Data to Improve Recruitment to Randomized Trials: The QuinteT Approach
- In this article, we describe the research methods underpinning the “QuinteT” (Qualitative Research Integrated Within Trials) approach to understand and address RCT recruitment difficulties. The QuinteT Recruitment Intervention (QRI) brings together multiple qualitative strategies and quantitative data and uses triangulation to understand recruitment issues rapidly.
Training resources
Online recruitment training resource (requires NIHR learn login)
Online recruitment training resource (requires NIHR learn login)
