The clinical research community often relates the standard of clinical research to the quality of the data we collect. Much in the same way, the NHS talks about excellence in clinical care being reliant on the dynamic between health professional and patient. Both of these statements are true, but they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it’s critical we connect both relationships during the research pathway if we are to build an internationally recognised research culture.
Good Clinical Practice (GCP) is the ethical and practical standard to which all clinical research is conducted and it sits at the heart of clinical research in the NHS. A fundamental principle of GCP is the collection of high quality data, which is closely associated with patient safety. Over 23,000 research professionals took our Introduction to GCP course last year and their commitment to high quality data is having an impact beyond the research environment.
I was recently on a clinical visit shadowing a research nurse; we were looking at data taken during routine care which was then being used in a clinical research study. This nurse works to a GCP standard, which is “all clinical information shall be recorded, handled and stored in such a way that it can be accurately reported interpreted and verified while the confidentiality of the trial subjects remains protected”.
This nurse had worked hard with colleagues to meet this standard and the benefits weren’t confined to the research study. All the staff on the unit developed a much better appreciation of just how frontline routine data might be used for research purposes. This understanding meant the quality of all data on the unit improved because of the presence of an active clinical research team.
As the ward sister said: “It is significant to see such an improvement in the quality of documentation, all our patients have benefited from this”.
We know there is the potential to bring about improvements to clinical care through existing information systems, such as electronically stored patient observations being made available for further analysis. However, the full realisation of clinical benefits has been hampered by poor-quality deployment.
These deployments have too often resulted in clinicians seeing data collection as an additional task far removed from patient care. Perhaps we should more actively use the recent changes in the NHS Constitution which made clinical research core business for the NHS to build a bridge between data quality, research evidence and patient outcomes. Data to feed the management beast is never going to be a motivator for high quality inputs but data to deliver the best possible treatments for patients based on the evidence of what works is.
Embedding research as a frontline activity is clearly a current policy goal, with George Freeman now installed as life sciences minister. Research is good for the economy but fundamentally there is also a strong relationship between being a research active organisation and clinical quality. Going forward, we need to marry data quality with patient benefit to ensure the NHS embraces clinical research and embeds it at the heart of day-to-day practice.
Susan Hamer is NIHR clinical research network organisational and workforce development director
Content on this page is paid for and provided by NIHR, sponsor of the Guardian Healthcare Network’s clinical research zone.
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