We knew engagement would be crucial to enrolling participants to our research studies
“When first lockdown was announced in March 2020, we were already preparing to open up a huge number of Covid-19 research studies. We knew engagement with patients, their families and the general public would be crucial to successfully enrolling participants to our research studies. This included ensuring staff, patients and their families had access to up-to-date information about Covid-19 research taking place within our hospitals, so they could make an informed choice about taking part. We set up the Barts Health Covid Research Lay Advisory Group early on to help with this. They informed our engagement strategy and played an important role in reviewing study documents, including consent documents, to make sure the language was clear and accessible.
“Early on in the pandemic, it became clear that people from certain ethnicities were at greater risk of developing severe Covid-19 and dying. This shone a spotlight on the historical under-representation of ethnic minorities in clinical trials. We wanted to change this and so made our engagement strategy inclusive in a bid to encourage more people from diverse backgrounds to join trials. One example was when we worked in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London and the Barts Health Bilingual Health Advocacy team to film 19 short educational videos. These explain what happens in interventional and observational clinical trials in locally spoken languages, with translated subtitles. The videos were not only used during the consenting process and posted on the Barts Health website and YouTube channels, but also shared with the NIHR for their Be Part of Research platform, enabling us to reach so many more people as a result.
“We’ve also done a lot to support the Vaccines Trials Centre at Bethnal Green Library. Thanks in part to our efforts, around 26% of the 682 participants we recruited to the ENSEMBLE-2 trial were from an ethnic minority group. This might not seem like a very high proportion, but given the national average was closer to 14%, it feels like we’ve taken a small step in the right direction.
“We’ve made some positive strides with engagement during the pandemic which is really encouraging. But there’s still work to do to ensure that the participants in Barts Health clinical trials – and all clinical trials – are more diverse, and reflective of the population we serve”.
If you’d like to find out more about what ENSEMBLE-2 participants had to say about taking part in the study, check out the Patient Research Experience Survey results on WeShare and the JRMO website .
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