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Understanding the concept of Clinical Trials and how they can benefit you

We are passionate about building awareness of clinical trials across the globe and helping people lead healthier lives.

In 2017 More than 665,000 participants took part in clinical research studies supported by the Network this year. This is 10 per cent more than 2016.

One of the fundamental challenges faced by hospitals, medical practices and healthcare research organizations that are engaged in clinical trials is the recruitment and retention of volunteer participants.

A lot of patients are still unaware of clinical trials as an option in their care and fail to understand how their condition can be helped as well as helping others at the same time.

While others in the public don’t understand the concept, others hold negative perceptions about clinical trials and some people wonder if they will be receiving a placebo with no health benefit.

Negative perceptions make reaching and recruiting patients one of the biggest bottlenecks and costliest functions of clinical research. One of the tasks of external marketing is to communicate directly to prospective participants and provide reassuring and responsive information.

Several variables will dictate how a well-considered marketing plan is structured for external audience awareness. But elements to be used typically include clinical trial advertising techniques such as print ads in local newspapers and magazines, radio-campaigns, posters on underground trains and trams and community health fairs. There are many ways to talk about and promote clinical trials but planning out who you would like your target audience to be is crucial, so you can limit down the number of platforms you can use, e.g. London newspapers or Scotland radio campaigns.

Research sponsors have increasingly relied on doctors to recruit patients within their own patient bases. For a variety of reasons, potential referral sources are unaware of trials, do not have the time to learn about the study details or avoiding trials as inappropriate for their patients.

Patients tend to avoid asking the question unless mentioned so communicating with an internal audience, particularly those professional colleagues who can identify potential candidates and make referrals is likely to be more targeted and easier to reach with informative and educational marketing messages. Professional colleagues (doctor to doctor) are the most frequent, and often most trusted, sources of information.

Depending on the circumstances, marketing objectives and communications tools that reach, this audience may include email to specific doctors in your database, direct post, news articles in internal publications, doctor-direct presentations and physician liaison work.

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We are patient-centric. We have grown our business on what drives results for our clients, whilst creating the optimum experience for patients and volunteers to find clinical trials.

Our extensive experience in patient recruitment enables us to tackle many of the challenges our clients may have been having, to propose the right solutions and to deliver quality referrals. To find out more about how we can build a bespoke digital outreach campaign for you anywhere in the world, drop us an email or give us a call and speak to one of our team:

amber@absolutely.health – 019 9256 6717