NEW Webinars Available

Two new webinars on PREPARE’s work, which maps ethical, administrative, regulatory and logistical (EARL) barriers and solutions, and REACTing’s approach to adding social science into clinical trials are now available on the GloPID-R website.

Research Fellow Nina Gobat highlights the role of PREPARE in providing a research infrastructure across Europe with capability to respond to new and re-emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. The primary aim is to inform clinical management rapidly.

The PRACTICE platform, which is where the clinical studies are housed within PREPARE, was the base upon which the mapping of EARL barriers and solutions exercise was built. The EARL work package is designed to identify and implement solutions to key EARL bottlenecks. The focus has been on identifying where delays arise and what solutions there may be to speed up the delays or to work around them. The challenge, at the same time as being the opportunity for innovation, is to do this without compromising the scientific and ethical integrity of the work.

Professor Vinh-Kim Nguyen gives an overview of REACTing’s approach to anthropological research during the 2015 West African Ebola epidemic and demonstrates the important role of social science research to improve the implementation and uptake of clinical trials in outbreak situations.

Anthropologists offer a unique understanding on local institutions, social representation and how local sociality is constituted. During the 2015 clinical trials, the target communities were studied with as much interest as the trial infrastructure. Vinh-Kim highlights that there is no single “community” and that thorough work and discussions with the various communities and opinion leaders are key to ensure the sound understanding and lasting cooperation needed to make clinical trials a success.

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