UCLH is gearing up to celebrate International Clinical Trials Day on Friday 17 May to raise awareness of research happening across UCLH and to encourage patients and the public to get involved in research.
Research plays a vital role in improving patient care and UCLH services. On the day, researchers and research staff will be on hand at stalls across the Trust to answer questions about research and how to get involved.
Stalls – featuring interactive activities and with information to take away – will be found at:
University College Hospital
10am-3pm
Ground floor atrium, 235 Euston Road, London NW1 2BU
Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital
10am-2pm
Lower ground floor, 330 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8DA
Eastman Clinical Investigation Centre
10am-1pm
UCL Eastman Dental Institute, 256 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8LD
Celebrations for International Clinical Trials Day 2019 come shortly after UCLH launched a new, searchable database of all trials taking place across the Trust, known as Find a Study.
Developed by Dr Wai Keong Wong, UCLH’s Chief Research Information Officer, working within the UCLH Clinical Research Informatics Unit (CRIU), the database is designed to improve awareness of research and improve recruitment.
The database – which supersedes the old UCLH Research Gateway – will link with Epic, UCLH’s electronic health record system.
May 2019 also represents the third anniversary of the UCLH Emergency Department’s Emergency Medicine Based Research and Clinical Excellence (EMBRaCE) team, which over the last three years has recruited an impressive 417 patients (and counting) over five trials.
The EMBRaCE team is composed of ED consultant Dr Samer Elkhodair, Dr Clovis Rau, a research fellow, and three seconded research nurses: Ceris Tuckey, Bobby Garcia, and Ciara Murphy.
One of the team’s current trials is the Aerogen Study, testing an innovative device which delivers lifesaving drugs to asthmatic patients through a vibrating mesh instead of the traditional, conventional jet nebulisers that are usually driven by oxygen or medical air.
The device aims to reduce the length of stay in the ED and hospital admission rates. The team will present preliminary results of the study in Seoul, South Korea, in June 2019.
International Clinical Trials Day is held each year to commemorate the day that James Lind began his trials into the causes of scurvy, a disease resulting from a deficiency of vitamin C.
Lind's experiments in 1747 were run under very different conditions to today. He was serving as a surgeon on HMS Salisbury and his trial consisted of just 12 men, grouped into pairs and given a variety of dietary supplements from cider to oranges and lemons.
The trial only lasted six days but, within that time, there was a noticeable improvement in the group eating the fruit, providing Lind with evidence of the link between citrus fruits and scurvy.
