BioMed Central are proud to be working with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to help them create and launch their new online resource UKCTG – UK Clinical Trials Gateway
Professor Dame Sally C. Davies, Chief Medical Officer (CMO)
for England said,
“I am extremely pleased to announce that phase 2 of the UK Clinical Trials Gateway is now available for people to try out. It will increase transparency in research and will make it easy for patients,
their doctors and carers, friends and families to see what clinical trials are
taking place, what each trial is about, where it is taking place, and who is
running it. The NIHR will go on working
to improve it.”
The UK Clinical Trials Gateway will increasingly provide easy to understand information about clinical research trials running in the UK. It is designed to enable you and your clinician to locate trials of interest to you.
The information will be taken from a variety of national registers that are publicly available, allowing you to search a number of different international trial registries. This means that it can include trials that may be run from other countries but which have part of the study taking place in the UK.
One of the primary aims of the Gateway is to make trial information available to everyone for whom it is relevant ensuring the Government meet its commitment in the NHS Constitution.
The gateway is designed to be simple to use and this starts with the search function whereby trials can be found either by a broad keyword search or using a more specific query such as trial ID, funder or sponsor depending upon the information you have at hand.
One important aspect of the UKCTG is the lay summary where the trials have been translated from high-level medical language into a more friendly version, making the trial information much more accessible for patients, trialists and casual readers alike. This helps the Government meet its commitment in the NHS Constitution that the NHS will ensure that patients are made aware of research that is of particular relevance to them.
The UKCTG is being run by the NIHR on behalf of all the UK Health Departments. We are also being helped by a number of clinical research charities, research
professionals and patient representatives including consultancy from Current Controlled Trials (CCT) Ltd.
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