This study aims to create a tool that can include patient partner opinions into discussions around missing data in clinical trials.
Clinical trials are research studies that test a medical, surgical, or behavioural intervention in people. During the trial participants may undergo various health measurements. They may choose to stop their involvement before the trial ends for whatever reason, which means any future health measurements are no longer collected.
Imagine each participant's measurement is a piece of a larger puzzle. At the end of a clinical trial, researchers will try to understand the result by putting all these pieces together. If there are pieces missing, it can be hard to understand the results, as they cannot see the whole picture.
Despite this difficulty, researchers do have ways to handle these missing pieces, but their decisions are made without involving the participants. Hence, this research aims to explore whether patient partners (representing trial participants) can be part of this decision-making process.
It seeks to develop a tool that can be used by researchers with the help of patient partners. The tool aims to provide recommendations to researchers on how to interpret the trial results when some pieces are missing.
This project is linked to the PhD project of Sophie Greenwood: “Eliciting and incorporating patients’ opinions about missing data in randomised controlled trials”.
Supervision: Dr Beatriz Goulao, Dr Tim Morris, Dr Lorna Aucott, Dr Lucy O’Malley
Contacts
- Sophie Greenwood; s.greenwood.22@abdn.ac.uk