Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen, UK

The Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen is the lead centre for Trial Forge.  Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard for evaluating healthcare treatments and thousands are done every year.  Tens of billions of pounds of public and private money are invested globally in trials every year.     

Some of these resources are being wasted.  Despite trials being a cornerstone of evidence-based healthcare, how we make trial process decisions is a largely evidence-free zone.  For example, every single trial has to recruit participants but so far methodological research has produced high certainty evidence for only a handful of recruitment interventions.  Research questions may not reflect what patients and professionals are most interested in; existing evidence may be ignored; outcomes, especially secondary ones, may simply burden trials with collecting data that are never published.  Trials are in desperate need of efficiency improvements.

Trial Forge was set up to help do this and the Aberdeen Centre is where Trial Forge activity is coordinated.  Although we are interested in all trial processes, we tend to concentrate on recruitment, retention and data collection.  We’re big fans of Studies Within A Trial (SWATs) and formal methods of prioritising unanswered research questions in trial methodology research.