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Latest news

Our PPI guidance for Chief Investigators of surgical trials is available to download here.

For an up-to-date list of reports and publications from the PIRRIST project, please click here.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the PIRRIST project - it would not have been a success without you!

Background

Clinical trials, including surgical trials, often struggle to recruit patient participants and keep them in the trial (retention). These difficulties can mean a trial takes longer, costs more money, or even fails completely.

Patient and public involvement (PPI) is research being carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ patients and/or members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them. PPI in designing and doing trials has the potential to enhance recruitment and retention, but the evidence for this is weak at best. We also don’t know what kind of PPI is likely to lead to the biggest improvements in recruitment and retention.

Aims

We wanted to investigate these issues by developing and testing a PPI ‘intervention’ aimed at improving recruitment and/or retention in surgical trials (including trials of surgical procedures and trials of other interventions [e.g. drugs, devices, dressings, physiotherapy] in adult surgical patients before, during or after surgery).

We planned to develop an intervention that is as practical and useful as possible by involving surgical trial investigators, administrators, PPI coordinators and PPI contributors (patients and members of the public involved in surgical trials) in the development process. We invited people in these roles across the UK to take part from September 2015. The project consisted of several phases including surveys, focus groups and a consensus workshop.

We hoped that this exciting project would improve our understanding of PPI impact and of recruitment and retention challenges in surgical trials, as well as providing an evidence-based PPI intervention which could be realistically used in practice.

Project team

 

Joanna Crocker

Health Experiences Institute, University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre

Richard Bulbulia

Clinical Trial Service Unit, Nuffield Department of Population Health and MRC CTSU Hub for Trials Methodology Research, University of Oxford

Jennifer Bostock

Lay Partner

Alan Chant

Patient Partner

Jonathan Cook

Surgical Intervention Trials Unit, University of Oxford, and MRC ConDuCT-II Hub for Trials Methodology Research

Nicola Farrar

Surgical Intervention Trials Unit, University of Oxford

Caroline Jordan

Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford

Polly Kerr

PPI Manager, NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre

Louise Locock

Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen

Sophie Olszowski

SPZ Associates

Sian Rees

Health Experiences Institute, University of Oxford

Shaun Treweek

Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen

Kerry Woolfall

Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, University of Liverpool and MRC North West Hub for Trials Methodology Research

 

Collaborators and Advisors

Jane Blazeby, MRC ConDuCT-II Hub for Trials Methodology Research, University of Bristol

Louise Bowman, MRC CTSU Hub for Trials Methodology Research, Clinical Trial Service Unit, University of Oxford

Cushla Cooper, Surgical Intervention Trials Unit, University of Oxford

Loretta Davies, Surgical Intervention Trials Unit, University of Oxford

Simon Denegri, National Institute for Health Research and INVOLVE

Nigel Drury, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Birmingham

David Evans, University of the West of England

Alison Halliday, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford

Allison Hirst, IDEAL Collaboration

Adwoa Parker, Department of Health Sciences, University of York

Emma Jones, University of Warwick

Simon Knight, Centre for Evidence in Transplantation and Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford

Laura Magill, Birmingham Surgical Trials Consortium

Rebecca Harmston, Lay Contributor

Peter McCulloch, IDEAL Collaboration and University of Oxford

Michael Osborne, Patient Contributor

David Simpson, Lay Contributor

Rosamund Snow, Patient Advisor and University of Oxford

Tim Sprosen, Clinical Trial Service Unit, University of Oxford

Lisa Hinton, Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford

 

Contact information

For more information please contact the lead researcher Joanna Crocker (joanna.crocker@phc.ox.ac.uk), Senior Researcher, Interdisciplinary Research In Health Sciences, University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre

The study was supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and the MRC Network of Hubs for Trials Methodology Research, and was part of the Trial Forge initiative to improve trial efficiency.

 

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