Tagged / participants

Improving information for people taking part in clinical research

Guidance, NHS, Research Ethics

The Health Research Authority (HRA) has launched new Quality Standards to improve information given to people who are invited to take part in research. The Quality Standards have been launched alongside Design and Review Principles, which show researchers and Research Ethics Committees (REC) what the important ethical considerations are for participant information.

  • The new HRA Participant Information Quality Standards will help research organisations to understand what good participant information looks like, and will make clear to researchers what the Research Ethics Committees will consider as part of the ethics review, including the review of participant information. The REC will support researchers to create information that meets the Quality Standards.
  • The aim of the Quality Standards and Design and Review Principles is to make participant information better, and to make the way that RECs review that information more consistent. The documents set out the basic criteria that all participant information must meet, and covers language, accessibility, and mandatory content.

Next steps

The Quality Standards and Design and Review Principles will be phased in from autumn 2023. As study materials are prepared in advance, REC reviews of participant information will initially be presented to research organisations as recommendations as opposed to actions required for approval.

From December 2023, the Quality Standards and Design and Review principles will become mandatory and will be applied to all research applications submitted for review.

Changes to participant information are currently the most likely reason for ethics committees to give a provisional opinion. Using this guidance will increase the possibility of receiving a favourable opinion.

Available templates

Remember that BU has Participant Information Sheet templates that provide much of the required wording to ensure your participants are making a fully informed decision before agreeing to participate.

It is vital that when compiling your information sheets that you remember to include the HRA GDPR transparency wording.

Questions or concerns?

If you have any questions regarding these new standards or about clinical research in general, please email Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor – swignall@bournemouth.ac.uk or clinicalresearch@bournemouth.ac.uk

Dorset Serious Crime Project

Dorset Community Action has been commissioned by the Home Office to carry out interviews in support of their Serious Crime Project.

The aim is that this project will add valuable insight and context to wider research and analysis being undertaken to inform a local strategic needs assessment, and ultimately the Dorset Serious Violence Strategy.

The intended outcome from these case studies of victim/survivors of serious violence is to gain a greater understanding of their individual situations:

·       Were there certain conditions in place at the time the serious violence happened.

·       Was the serious violence a pattern of behaviour, possibly an escalation of behaviour and offending.

·       How had being a victim of serious violence impacted on the individual emotionally and physically.

·       What pre- and post-offence interventions from services were available, accepted, required;

(or what wasn’t available but needed/wanted)

·       How has the overall experience influenced both current and future behaviour.

The participants need to be Dorset residents and over 18.

Please, find more information in the flyer here: Serious Crime Request Flier

All final data will be shared with all stakeholders involved in the project.

Any support you can offer with this project will be very much appreciated.

Ground-breaking article by Jones and Fenge

PG research

Kip Jones and Lee-Ann Fenge are pleased to announce that our article to appear shortly in Creative Approaches to Research, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, “Gift Stories How Do We Retell the Stories that Research Participants Give Us?” is now available on BRIAN.

We passionately believe that as narrative researchers and storytellers we must promote narrative in the content and styles of our publications. To revert to a style of publication or presentation that is counter to this does a disservice to our commitments as narrativists.

We can no longer afford to ignore the great advances made in representation of qualitative data. These have been overwhelmingly demonstrated by the successes achieved in auto-ethnography, poetic enquiry, ethno-drama, film, Performative Social Science and/or other arts-based efforts in research and dissemination.

 

Need participants for your research? Check out this JISC-funded initiative

Advertise your surveys, interviews and other research studies to thousands of participants for free on Call For Participants:

Call For Participants is an online community for researchers and participants, funded by Jisc. University staff and students can use this service for free to advertise their surveys, interviews and other research studies to the public and recruit participants.

Researchers can also access other support and resources, such as webinars, guidance on communicating research to the public, ethics guidance, and case studies to support their research activities. Call For Participants is used and trusted by academic researchers from over 340 universities worldwide.

To advertise a survey, interview or other research study, visit the researcher homepage and create a study page. For resources and support for researchers visit the researcher support page, and the blog.

call for participants webpage