What’s New?

Professor Vicki Goodwin at Exeter University has led work to develop best practice recommendations on including older people in health and social care research based on the NIHR INCLUDE framework. Older people are a broad heterogenous group, ranging from healthy individuals to those with severe [...]

The STRIDE project has come up with eight recommendations for trial teams grappling with how to decide which ethnic groups their trial needs.  The recommendations came as a result of discussions with panels of public contributors, trialists, health professionals and others. Some of the key [...]

Trial Steering Committees can seem a bit daunting but the Trial Methodology Research Network (TMRN) in Ireland is running a 1-day online workshop on 15th May 2023 on what to expect on a Trial Steering Committee.  The workshop faculty is superb and will give researcher, public, governance and [...]

In 2022 we published an article called ‘Getting it wrong most of the time? Comparing trialists’ choice of primary outcome with what patients and health professionals want‘.  It looked at the outcomes selected in 44 breast cancer and kidney trials and asked patients and health [...]

Can you help with the development of the INCLUDE Impaired Capacity to Consent Framework by piloting the framework and sharing feedback about how it can be used in practice? Trials involving adults who lack capacity to consent can be challenging. Following on from the NIHR INCLUDE guidance to [...]

The journal Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences is running a special issue addressing on 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 (we think there should be more of them) [...]

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 […]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]