Two of five of our 2019 projects are now in the launch phase or complete:
Project 1: Consumer Involvement and Engagement
The Toolkit was launched at the ACTA International Conference on 4-October!!
The Toolkit is a joint initiative between Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA) and Clinical Trials: Quality & Impact (CT:IQ) providing practical advice for researchers and research organisations wishing to conduct patient-centred clinical trials.
Through the use of an interactive map, the Toolkit provides guidance and tools to help plan, deliver, evaluate and report consumer and community involvement and engagement activities. The Toolkit’s focus is clinical trials, however, much of the content is relevant to other types of health research. Development of a living repository accessible via an online platform provides a mechanism to share resources both locally and internationally in the future.
https://involvementtoolkit.clinicaltrialsalliance.org.au/
Project 2: eConsent in Clinical Trials
‘Opportunities to enhance patient engagement’
This project was launched to CT:IQ members on the 24-Jun and was launched publicly at the AusBiotech International Conference on 31-Oct. This project, completed in partnership with Chrysalis Advisory, described the current use and adoption of eConsent, investigated barriers to the uptake of eConsent within the Australian clinical trial context and created actionable insights to support increased adoption of the technology.
Project 3: Early Phase Trials Best Practice
This project will identify, summarise and test recommendations for best practise conduct of early phase clinical trials. The team has just completed developing an excel based self-auditing checklist tool. Testing of the checklist tool with end-users is about to begin. The final checklist will be released to our members at the end of the year and publicly launched soon after.
Project 4: Clinical Trial Site Recruitment
This project will develop best practice guidelines for optimising clinical trial recruitment which are broadly applicable and translational at the site level. The project team has now finished drafting best practice guidelines and is currently looking at online tools to enable this information to be easily accessible to clinical trial site staff. The tool will be tested and released to our members at the end of the year and the associated website launched soon after publicly.
The primary objective of this project is to guide policy makers and clinicians to what evidence is needed to make treatment recommendations for individual patients, especially linked to their Biomarker profiles. A systematic review of the current guidelines is underway and the first of two expert meetings was held on the 16th of November at the NHMRC CTC to refine the nature and scope of the problem.
CT:IQ is the only initiative where government and clinical trial stakeholders can come together to undertake meaningful sector improvement initiatives. If you or your organisation is interested in improving the impact, quality or efficiency of the way clinical trials are conducted get in touch with CT:IQ’s Programme Director, Leanne Weekes, leanneweekes@ctiq.com.au and check out our website: https://ctiq.com.au
CT:IQ Programme Level Updates
CT:IQ has presented five times at four conferences over the last quarter discussing CT:IQ sector improvement project progress; ARCS 2019, BioConnections 2019, the ACTA international Conference and AusBiotech 2019 in addition to participating in a second MTPConnect podcast and a Praxis Webinar.