News

What is the Trial Forge SWAT Network?

We’d like to bring groups that do SWATs together into a network, which would be a good way of keeping everyone up to speed with what sort of SWATs people would like to see being done, which SWATs people are doing now and to run seminars where we could discuss issues that are challenging, or just interesting. Some seminars would be just for the network, others could be opened up.

A key player in organizing the network will be the York Trial Forge SWAT Centre at the York Trials unit, together with the Aberdeen Trial Forge Centre.

We’d now like to invite groups to join the Network.

How does a group become a member?

Like all clubs worth joining, there are a few entry requirements:

The group has to have completed at least one SWAT (preferably published), be doing a SWAT right now or interested in doing a SWAT in the near future.
The group has at least two staff who are ‘SWAT researchers’ and who can be the points of contact for network activity.
The group has to be keen on starting at least one new SWAT every year.
The group has to be willing to register its SWATs on the SWAT Repository.
That’s it. The group can be anywhere in the world and working in any trial area.

How do we join the Trial Forge SWAT Network?

Send an email to prometheus-group@york.ac.uk and info@trialforge.org, and we can have a chat.

One way to fill gaps in trial process evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. A while ago, the Health Research Board–Trial Methodology Research Network in Ireland together with Trial Forge produced a 2-page summary of the SWAT guidance that we published in Trials (see Trial Forge SWAT guidance).

The 2-page summary is now also available in German, have a look at this document in German.

Vielen Dank to Susanne Döpfmer, at the Institute of General Practice, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, for doing the translation.

Randomised trials are a central component of all evidence-informed health care systems and the evidence coming from them helps to support health care users, health professionals and others to make more informed decisions about treatment. The evidence available to trialists to support decisions on design, conduct and reporting of randomised trials is, however, sparse.

One way to fill gaps in evidence is to run Studies Within A Trial, or SWATs. At some point, increasing SWAT evidence will lead funders and trialists to ask: given the current body of evidence for a SWAT, do we need a further evaluation in another host trial? This new Trial Forge guidance provides a set of criteria for answering this question. The intention is to avoid SWATs themselves contributing to research waste

We hope the guidance will be useful to trialists, methodologists, funders, approvals agencies and others in making clear when a new evaluation of a SWAT intervention is needed and, importantly, when it is no longer a priority.

The guidance is published in Trials (https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-019-3980-5) and is also part of the SWAT guidance package on the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) website (https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/studies-within-a-trial-swat/21512).

ESP2 is now live! See https://w3.abdn.ac.uk/hsru/ESP2/

ESP2 asks the people who set up new trial recruitment sites to use an 8-item checklist to give their predictions of trial site recruitment at the site. We need 1000 site recruitment predictions and it would be fantastic if you and your colleagues could get involved. Everything is done online through the ESP2 website.

Trial Forge has teamed up with the UK Trial Managers’ Network (UKTMN) to do ESP2, which is the much bigger follow-on study to the original ESP project published in the journal Trials. The new guided prediction form from the first project is at the heart of ESP2.

See the ESP2 website for more details and the resources below.

Resources

Key facts slides set as Powerpoint and pdf.
A5 flyer on ESP2.

A Trial Forge recruitment project called Estimating Site Performance (ESP) has just been published in the journal Trials. The study asked trial managers at the Centre for Healthcare Randomised Trials (CHaRT), University of Aberdeen, to predict whether a site would recruit to target. No guidance was given as what trial managers should consider when making this judgement.

Ten trial managers made predictions for 56 site visits recruiting to eight trials. Trial managers correctly identified 65% of sites that would hit their recruitment target and 54% of those that did not. Eight ‘red flags’ for recruitment failure were identified: previous poor site performance; slow approvals process; strong staff/patient preferences; the site recruitment target; the trial protocol and its implementation at the site; lack of staff engagement; lack of research experience among site staff; and busy site staff. These red flags to develop a guided prediction form.

The new guided prediction form will be used in a new, much larger follow-on project: ESP2. We’ll need 1000 recruitment predictions in ESP2 so if youiare interested in helping, get in touch at info@trialforge.org.

The full article is at https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3287-6.