IRIS BEAT (Improving Retention In Studies - BEhavioural Activation Toolkit)

Shared by Beth Fordham, a health psychologist at the Kadoorie Institute of Trauma, Emergency and Critical Care in the University of Oxford.

"We run clinical trials to decide how best to care for people when they experience a trauma, emergency or critical injury. We have looked at our data over the past few years and noticed that people who live in areas of high social deprivation are more likely to drop out of clinical trial research. This means that the voices and feedback of this community are under-served and not represented in the healthcare decisions for trauma, emergency and critical care."

"My project would like to hear from people who live in areas of high socioeconomic deprivation and understand if we can change the way that clinical trial research is conducted to make it easier for people to remain in clinical trials and make the findings more representative of the UK population."

"The project is called IRIS-BEAT (Improving Retention In Studies - BEhavioural Activation Toolkit). We used the Governmental Indices of Multiple Deprivation map tool to identify geographical locations of high deprivation, such as Gorleston. We would like to link up with a community stakeholder. The idea is for the community stakeholder to recruit up to ten people from the local community to attend a focus group. We would like the community stakeholder to facilitate the focus group, with support from our researcher. The idea behind it is that, if there is a mistrust of healthcare systems and/or academic institutions, then this might provide a barrier to open discussion in the focus group. If a trusted local champion, i.e. a foodbank coordinator, was leading the group this might invite more open and important discussions."

"We anticipate running these groups from January 2027 in a local venue, which is easy for people from the community to reach, or if preferrable, we can run them as online focus groups."

"We would like to reimburse the community stakeholder for their time contributing to this research. In line with national guidance, we offer £27.50 per hour."

For more information, please email beth.fordham@ndorms.ox.ac.uk