Interviewee quotes for facilitating and optimising trainee collaborative research
| Facilitator | Participant quotes |
| TRCs facilitation of collaborative research and consultant support | Mentorship ‘Medical students coming, they can see that senior registrars want to make contributions and hopefully inspire people or guide them in the path … there’s an educational, a mentorship element’. (P04, trainee, interview) Consultant support ‘Our role with them is an apprenticeship in trials … they are actually gaining the exposure to working with an expert team, which is really valuable and unique’. (P11, consultant, interview) ‘The consultants are there for mentorship but also because we need consistency within the site … because trainees move around the region’. (P02, trainee, interview) Widening access and providing choice ‘There are a few people that like to get involved in different aspects of the research pathway … part of the attractiveness of it [TRC involvement] is that you can be as much or as little invested in it as you like’. (P12, trainee, interview) |
| TRCs engaging with CTU and research nurses | CTUs ‘A person who will be based within the [CTU], whose remit will be to spend their entire time working with trainees … on an idea that we have said it’s worth taking forward and they will help them deliver the first steps of it’. (P28, methodologist, interview) ‘[methodologist] has been supporting us … we are trying to build that link … he came along to our meetings … you can’t do these things out of thin air; you need to link in with people who have expertise, and the trials unit is great for that’. (P06, trainee, interview) Research nurses ‘Tap into your research nurse. Because the research nurses are the ones with all the protocols, all the paperwork, they’ve probably got more time to discuss the studies with you than the consultants’. (P29, research nurse, interview) ‘We’d never done anything like this before … it’s not bad, it’s just the enormity of the challenge … previously … there’s one or two doctors that you liaise with … it’s a very clear linear pathway as to who’s your point of contact, and who’s recruiting the patients… then … there is this new idea of getting as many trainees involved in research, and … a whole new strategy that we had to come up with’. (P32, research nurse, interview) ‘We managed to set up a WhatsApp group … liaising on a daily basis making sure that you connected with the surgical trainee that was on that day, what they had and hadn’t done, who were the eligible patients?’. (P32, research nurse, interview) |
| Transparency in roles and authorship | Clarity and transparency in roles and responsibilities ‘For trainee involvement to work well there has to be a clear objective task for them to do … for a specific award had to be clearly defined’. (P26, methodologist, interview) ‘In the [CTU] we’ve got a policy that if somebody moves on, they do not lose their intellectual property rights … we expect you to respond to requests and … a system like … the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors as to who is eligible to be an author’. (P21, methodologist, interview) Collaborative authorship ‘The research collaborative is offering something different … we have a corporate authorship policy whereby this single authorship for anything that comes from the groups and then within … will be broken down into different groups … writing groups, steering group, data analysis, local leads, collaborators’. (P12, trainee, interview) ‘I think there’s a perception that it’s more useful, more important to have your own first-author paper’. (P07, trainee, interview) ‘It [corporate authorship] doesn’t in any way recognise the disproportionate or the varying effort that different trainees make … we ended up with … sixty-five authors … it’s promoting a lot of the worst practice that happens with medical authorship in my opinion’. (P26, methodologist, interview) |
| Achievable study designs | ‘Don’t start with a trial, because it takes a long time, you need a grant, stats, a protocol and ethics, and those are the hardest things to do … Start with a simple, collaborative prospective snapshot audit or cohort study … a quick win, then set up some bigger stuff, like trials’. (P08, consultant, interview) ‘I think another thing is running simpler studies … entry step, so that they can see, well this is what collaborative studies are about … and maybe they’ll be excited and inspired to then take part in an RCT’. (P07, trainee, interview) |
| Training and career progression | ‘We’ve moved towards changing some of our CCT requirements from … you have to produce three papers … that actually nobody seems to really care what the quality is and what the content is it’s just sort of a box ticking exercise. There’s a move from that to having recruited a certain number of patients … I think that if you were to make it a requirement that would shift the culture and the way people think about these things’. (P06, trainee, interview) ‘I think you need to understand the methodology more, so I absolutely think there is a place in the curriculum. I think if you’re going to shift critical mass of understanding about research, that’s one of the only ways it’s going to happen’. (P05, trainee, interview) ‘They have set up what they call a co-PI network, so they’ve got the PIs … the experienced [clinician] and they’ve all identified a junior colleague who is working with them’. (P20, methodologist, interview) ‘Ideally, we would give people time, because I think that’s the biggest, constraint people have. Everyone’s busy, you know, they’ve got on-call rotas, they’re busy looking after patients on the ward, they’re trying to go to theatre to get their surgical training, and this stuff does take time. It takes time to get your head around the trial, to see a patient, talk to patients about it, so if there was one thing we could do, I would say, ‘Well, let’s give every single trainee in the region half a day a week or whatever to spend participating in research’. That would be a huge help’. (P07, trainee, interview) ‘There’s no substitution for being involved and learning on the job as you would because you see the pitfalls, you understand the drawbacks and limitations of things, hurdles that you have to get across then also you learn about the rules and regulations of everything, why they’re in place, the importance of the protecting patients, protecting clinicians and all that kind of thing as well that you don’t really grasp unless you apply it in practice’. (P02, trainee, interview) |
CTU, Clinical Trials Unit; TRC, Trainee Research Collaborative.