If you’re interested in conducting clinical trials, you might hear a lot about the importance of diversity in the recruitment of participants. While it’s a great idea to have a diverse group of participants, you may be wondering what diversity means in the context of clinical trials. Here are some examples of clinical trial diversity that are important to your study.
For example, you should consider recruiting participants from underrepresented groups such as people of different ages, genders, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, health statuses, and other groups.
If you’d like to learn more about clinical trials and how to recruit diverse groups of participants, check out this post.
Why Do Trials Lack Diversity?
Several factors contribute to how effective a particular treatment can be, such as age, geographical location, gender, genetics, racial heritage, and more. However, many clinical trials seldom target every subgroup to address these concerns.
Recruiting participants across all populations is quite a daunting task, and the majority of the questions and issues are universal – from questions about potential benefits and risks to travel, scheduling, and compensation issues.
Besides those questions and issues, the people who often are underrepresented in healthcare have a higher likelihood of being underrepresented in clinical trials as well. These barriers could either be linguistic, economic, religious, cultural, or physical (for example lack of access to a health center nearby).
In addition, many sponsors of studies tend to recruit patients from renowned academic medical institutions, where the patient population is highly likely to be disproportionate to others.
Referrals from physicians also play a crucial role in clinical trial recruitment. However, some physicians are hesitant to refer their patients if they suspect that those patients will be receiving healthcare services at a different entity.
How Can We Promote Diversity in Clinical Trials?
There is plenty of diversity and researchers should make sure that they do not always pick patients from the same region or educational and socio-economic backgrounds. The medical community can promote diversity by:
1. Engaging marginal communities
To integrate diversity in clinical trials, researchers should reach marginal communities. They should take research into the communities where people look for healthcare – to the practitioner down the street and to the primary care specialist.
The medical community themselves can promote diversity by acting as trial investigators to engage their patients and inform them what they need to know about clinical trials. The reason behind this move is that patients have a higher chance of trusting and participating in the clinical trial if they believe in the doctor.
2. Prioritize diversity internally
For the medical industry to make a breakthrough in terms of diversity, clinical and research teams must make diversity an internal focus – from the participants to the investigators. The efforts underway should be more inclusive. This will help to enhance the precision of the treatment because it will take into account the individual differences in biology, lifestyle, and environment.
Benefits of Diversity in Clinical Studies
Diversity in clinical trials is associated with an array of benefits such as:
- Clinical trials will be faster and more cost-efficient
- Research centers will experience higher rates of participation
- Medical researchers will obtain more reliable and precise results across the population census
Diversity in Clinical Trials: Final Thoughts
The medical research industry is slowly responding to the desperate need for diversity in clinical trials, but it still has a long way to go to make headway. Differences among people like age, location, gender, and racial background can produce entirely different results from the same treatment, and some groups of patient volunteers could experience different effects from the majority of the population.
For equality and diversity to be realized in clinical trials, medical research teams should be more committed to orchestrating change. All stakeholders have a role to play and they need to prioritize diversity in clinical trials to start noticing significant differences in the research industry.
