International Clinical Trials Day

May 20 is International Clinical Trials Day

AUCKLAND, May 20th

Six months since it was launched an award-winning New Zealand start-up is already showing it is making a key difference to new health research projects by helping them much more efficiently recruit volunteers, health researchers say. 

Over 200,000 New Zealanders enrol in health studies every year, but the difficulties of linking would-be volunteers with the right study have been so great that 50%- 85% of research studies still fail to meet their recruitment targets. As a result many have to be postponed or abandoned, or incur high ongoing costs in advertising and administration.

Professor Amanda Barusch at the Department of Social Work & Community Development at the University of Otago said the Getparticipants.com website found more than half the participants needed for a study on the relationships between young adults and their parents in just 12 hours.

“Recruiting problems can delay and even stop a project going ahead,” Professor Barusch said. “So this has been a real time-saver. It has saved me weeks that would otherwise have been spent on recruiting. It is a huge benefit.”

Professor Barusch recently posted her study, which is examining how relationships between parents and adult children are developing in times of increased longevity, on the Getparticipants.com website on a Sunday evening to find over half her volunteers had already enrolled by the time she next checked the site on Monday morning.  

Dr Markus Melloh, at the Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, said the site had made the crucial difference in whether a research project he is leading, studying chronic back pain, could continue.

Before registering at Getparticipants he was receiving only one new enrolment a week, now he said he is averaging five to ten, meaning that the study, which seeks to explain why some people get chronic back pain and others do not from seemingly similar injuries, can proceed.

“Getparticipants is the smartest approach I have seen anywhere to resolving the challenge of bringing researchers and volunteers together. Without it this research project would have almost certainly simply run out of time before it was able to recruit the numbers it needed.”

ends

© Scoop Media