Participation in medical research

Nowgen is working with Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC) and the Manchester Heart Centre on a project looking at what motivates people to participate in medical research and what puts people off. This research is being led by Dr Marisha Palm.

We recently conducted a survey of those attending the Manchester Science Festival and found that, although respondents expressed interest in medical research, only a small number reported having taken part in research.

Medical research is important to the development of new treatments and health care services. Recruitment to medical research is difficult, and it is important that a range of people take part so that researchers can be sure that the results apply to different populations.

Because it is difficult to recruit participants, researchers have taken a number of approaches to increasing the number of people taking part. As well as finding out more about motivators and barriers to participation, we are also interested in what people think of these different approaches.

There have not been many studies that have looked at healthy peoples’ views about medical research and how they feel about the approaches being used to recruit them. There are also no studies that we know of that have looked at patients with Long QT Syndrome, a rare heart condition, and their attitudes toward medical research and recruitment.

We will be running a series of focus groups with healthy participants and people with Long QT Syndrome. The focus groups will be comprised of between six and ten participants and are taking place in 2011.