Clinical research nurses perspective on recruitment challenges and lessons learnt from a large multi-site observational study

Background Recruitment of large numbers of study participants within a designated time frame for multi-site clinical research studies is a significant challenge faced by researchers. If a study does not manage to recruit targeted number of participants, it could have a significant impact on the statistical significance of the research. Purpose This paper highlights the challenges of recruitment for a large multi-site UK-based tuberculosis observational study ‘PREDICT’. Methods It uses a case study analysis from the research nurses perspective, and descriptive information retrieved from non-recruitment log forms to understand reasons for potential recruits not participating. Results Some of the main challenges to recruitment included patients not attending their clinic appointments, time required to obtain site-specific permissions and courier timings for blood sample collection. This paper also outlines key reasons for potential recruits who did not participate. Some of the common barriers to participation for non-recruited participants were work and family commitments, additional blood tests and language barriers. Conclusion Successful strategies which were implemented to overcome some of the challenges during the study are presented. This paper, therefore, aims to present the challenges faced, lessons learnt and successful strategies implemented to inform the planning of similar longitudinal studies of this scale in future.

Towards Sustainable and Smart Cities: Replicable and KPI-Driven Evaluation Framework

Sustainability is pivotal in the urban transformation strategy in order to reach more resource-efficient, resilient and smarter cities. The goal of being a sustainable city should drive the decisions for city interventions. Nonetheless, impacts need to be quantified, lacking of standard and/or common methodologies that could be replicable across multiple cities. There exist many initiatives aiming at defining indicators and assessment procedures, but without convergence in the definition of terms and application methodologies, making complex its real implementation. Within mySMARTLife project (GA#731297), a KPI-driven evaluation framework is defined with the aim of covering the multiple pillars of a city (i.e. energy, mobility, citizens, economy) in a holistic way. This methodology also defines the concepts and terms to guide urban planners and/or experts at time of implementing the framework in a specific city. The evaluation framework has been deployed in the three cities of Nantes, Hamburg and Helsinki and some lessons learnt have been extracted, such as the necessity of providing a definition of measurement boundary to avoid interpretations. Thanks to a co-creation strategy, the main difficulties and issues from the cities have been taken into consideration for increasing the replicability.