Symposium Celebrates Clinical Trials Success, Highlights Need to Innovate

Testing for Success - Celebrating Clinical Trials Excellence brought together more than 150 health service leaders, clinicians, researchers and consumers to share their insights on what is working well in clinical trials, and how Sydney Health Partners organisations can improve their clinical trial competitiveness.

Chief Executive of Northern Sydney Local Health District, Adjunct Professor Anthony Schembri, gave an opening address in which he described the impact on him of clinical trials during the AIDS epidemic of the early 1990s.

“Those trials transformed a fatal disease into one that can now be successfully treated, and they made me passionate about clinical trials as a pathway to equity in healthcare,” he said.

“Clinical trials are the secret sauce that lifts the quality of healthcare across our hospitals.”

The Director of the Westmead Applied Research Centre at Western Sydney Local Health District, Professor Clara Chow, described a clinical trial of a text message follow-up service for cardiovascular disease patients.

She said the trial had demonstrated the potential of the service and digital health interventions (DHIs) more generally, but much more clinical trial work was required.

“There is a lot of hype about DHIs, but a lack of robust evaluation has slowed their scale up in our health services,” she said.

The symposium debated the merits of novel clinical trial designs, including adaptive trials, registry-based trials and tele-trials.

Keynote speaker and Australian Clinical Trials Alliance Board Chair, Professor Chris Reid, called for a greater focus on decentralised or “virtual trials.”

“We have actually been doing trials like that for ages in primary care, but we need more of them to improve equity of access,” he said.

Professor Reid said one of ACTA’s priorities was to increase consumer involvement in the design and conduct of clinical trials.

“There is an appetite for a change in clinical trials culture and the best way to do that is by harnessing lived experience.”

Consumer advocate, Jan Mumford, told the Symposium that researchers should think more broadly about the kind of contributions that consumers can make to clinical trials.

“Consumers bring other skills to the table – they may have event management skills, they may have accountancy skills, they may be able to facilitate a session,” she said.

“We need both sides of the coin: the researchers who are leading the way and the community to work with them to make that happen.”