What do we want The People’s Trial to achieve?
We want The People’s Trial to help the public learn about randomised trials, to understand why they matter and to be better equipped to think critically about health claims. The People’s Trial will also help researchers learn about how best to involve the public in the steps of a trial process. This in turn will help influence other trials to be better designed and implemented in the future.
About
We are the Health Research Board-Trials Methodology Research Network (HRB-TMRN) based in NUI Galway and together with our Steering Group, we invite you to take part in The People’s Trial.
We want everyone to have the opportunity to take part and learn what randomised trials are, how they work and why they are important. We also want everyone to have fun along the way.
- Create a space online where people can contribute.
- Give the public the opportunity to discover why clinical trials are important.
- Show how people’s participation can positively improve the randomised trials process and provide an opportunity for shared learning around what works best.
How The People’s Trial will work.
Everything takes place online
1: What sort of questions could we try to answer?
All good trials start with a good question. We would like you to suggest questions we might use for The People’s Trial. Have you ever wondered whether it would be possible to get some proof for something you’d been told you had to do? Or just wanted to know more about something? We’ve given a few examples below of the sorts of questions we are thinking of. You’ll have heard all of these before but is there any truth behind them? Now’s your chance to find out. You can use any of these examples or, even better, come up with your own question.
2: Choosing our trial question
From your suggestions, we will get a list of great questions. We will only put on the list questions that could be answered through The People’s Trial. If people suggest similar questions, we might be able to join those up. We will then have a list of really interesting questions. The People’s Trial can only answer one question and YOU will choose it. We will ask people to vote for their favourite question from the list of questions we are sent. We’ll do this using short questionnaires.
3: What information do we need to collect to answer the People’s favourite question?
It’s not too late to join The People’s Trial, even if you’re here for the first time or haven’t taken part before. In Phase 1, people from 20 countries told us what questions they wanted answered. They came up with some great ideas… 155 questions in total! In Phase 2, the public picked their Top 10 questions and then almost 500 people from 42 countries picked the question they’d most like The People’s Trial to tackle.
4: Being a bit random– deciding who gets what in the trial
Researchers get excited about the idea of randomisation in trials. Why? What is its purpose and why is it important?
5: Run our study – The People’s Trial
Now we are ready to begin our trial…this step will depend on what our trial question is. We will keep you posted!
6: Report what we found
What did we discover during our trial?
7: So what we have learnt?
Does reading a book in bed make a difference in sleeping in comparison to not reading a book in bed?
