The Scottish Collaboration of Trialists
The Scottish Collaboration of Trialists (SCoT) is a four-year project involving the Universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, among others. The aim of the project is increase the ability of Scotland to run large, multicentre trials and to compete successfully for funding for these. The project will do this by providing tools, training and support in a range of trial areas such as recruitment, randomisation and data monitoring.
Dundee's main contribution (and therefore my own) is in the area of recruitment. Trials can be seriously compromised by low recruitment; often this leads to a result that is non-significant but which does not leave out the possibility that the intervention is of benefit. This means that another trial is required before a decision can be made. We would like to make it easier to recruit both patients and clinicians to trials. As our first project, we are developing software that sits on a clinician's desktop and remind him or her of ongoing trials and, if a patient is interested, it will provide the clinician with a simple one-click method of informing the trial team of a potential recruit (see the SARMA project). We are also running a parallel qualitative study looking at barriers and facilitators to the use of such a system by both clinicians and patients.
The budget for SCoT is around £1.2 million. The project began in December 2005.
SCoT has its own website at http://www.charttrials.abdn.ac.uk/scot/ (a new window will open).
This page was last updated 24th January 2007.