It’s not surprising that most people don’t hold informed—or strong beliefs about clinical trials—they’re what is termed “research-naïve,” meaning they have little or no personal experience with them. And so are most providers.
Sponsors and investigators—and funders, of course—are always in need of willing research participants and often additional study sites and partners. It’s important to know what fears, hopes, misconceptions and hesitations potential participants of all types may have that might drive—or dissuade—involvement so that these can be addressed.
The stakes if this isn’t handled right are apparently quite high—particularly when it comes to (potential or actual) participants or patients, as a new report refers to them.
“Industry and regulatory focus on patient centricity is imperative to ensure the survival of the clinical trial industry,” write the authors of the recently released 2023 WCG Avoca State of the Industry Report.[1] “Most Sponsor and Provider organizations base their study designs on feedback from investigators and patients who are familiar with the clinical trial industry. In order to expand the patient pool for clinical research, Sponsors must develop protocols that meet the needs of research-naïve patients and investigators.”
For the last two decades, WCG Avoca “surveyed industry executives to gain an understanding of key trends affecting outsourced clinical development” but realized the limits of the data it could collect—given that only a very “small population of physicians and patients contribute to what we know about motivations and impediments toward clinical trial participation.” Specifically, only 3% of physicians participate in clinical research. Looking just at cancer patients, it is under 5%, according to the report.
For its new report, WCG Avoca threw out a wider net and supplemented its data gathering with a 15-minute online survey and gathered responses from some 200 patients “who reflect the national population in terms of key demographic and socioeconomic variables,” namely age, gender, ethnicity, household income, level of education and location.
