Joy Oghogho Agbonmwandolor Senior research officer, David Evans Medical Research Centre, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Nottingham, England
Sarah Brand Assistant divisional nurse (research, practice development and education), Renal and Transplant Unit, David Evans Medical Research Centre, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Nottingham, England
Why you should read this article:

• To avoid underrepresentation of minority ethnic groups in clinical trials

• To ensure patients’ perspectives of participation are considered in clinical trials

• To understand how a face-to-face approach and the research team’s expertise can influence a patient’s decision

Background Clinical trial cohorts do not often reflect target patient populations because minority ethnic groups are underrepresented in clinical trials.

Aim To increase minority ethnic groups’ opportunities to participate in clinical trials, by evaluating ethnically diverse patients’ perspectives of considering participation in renal clinical research.

Discussion The authors gave patients participating in at least one research study the opportunity to take part in a structured survey. The survey explored preferences, barriers and opportunities that patients considered when deciding whether to take part in a clinical trial. The authors included participants from multiple ethnic groups so they could compare data for different ethnicities.

Conclusion Participation was a positive experience for most patients, mostly because of the research team’s flexibility and professionalism. Researchers’ gender and ethnicity did not affect the participants’ decision to participate. Cultural preferences were not obvious from the data as 80% of the participants were white.

Implications for practice Patients preferred a face-to-face approach and the expertise of the research team affected participation more than any other characteristics did. However, respondents were already research-engaged and conducting a similar study with those who have declined to participate in research may show different results.

Nurse Researcher. 31, 4, 38-44. doi: 10.7748/nr.2023.e1904

Correspondence

joy.agbonmwandolor@nuh.nhs.uk

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

Conflict of interest

None declared. This service evaluation received no external funding.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the members of the renal research team at David Evans Medical Research Centre, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, for their contributions to the development of the structured questionnaires and delivery of the study. They would also like to offer special thanks to the staff at the survey sites, as well as to the participants in the study

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