Proxemis & O’Shaughnessy

The challenge

The opportunity

“Primary care is a negligible provider of clinical trial activity, despite the opportunities it provides for delivering population scale trials, and there is too much reliance on hospital settings for the delivery of trials.” Despite 95% of all patient contacts with the NHS occurring in primary care, it has unacceptably poor representation in clinical trials. O’Shaughnessy elaborates that “only around 10% of clinical research activity (as measured by the number of participants) takes place in primary care despite the potential of this area, and around 4% of practices are recruiting patients to commercial trials”. He continues to outline how primary care professionals express a strong interest in participating in research, but identify administrative burdens, limited time, and insufficient funding as significant obstacles. We understand the potential of primary care to transform clinical trial recruitment, and drive research that is representative of, and beneficial to, the whole of the UK population.

Primary care data is incredibly rich, supporting the identification of more diverse, high-potential candidates for clinical trials. Moreover, primary care organisations cover the breadth of the UK, serving all communities regardless of background, ethnicity, gender, culture, geography or socioeconomic status. This enables two significant advantages – connecting more citizens with an avenue to get involved in clinical trials, and supporting research that benefits everyone in our diverse population. “Life science companies want and need to make sure their trial cohorts are as diverse as possible so that they can prove, with confidence, that their medicines will benefit people from all ethnicities and backgrounds. This works to our benefit, too, because the groups who gain most from taking part in more diverse research cohorts are precisely those people whose health needs are greatest and who are therefore of most interest to researchers.” Bringing together the unique combination of our reach into primary care communities and systems, alongside 20+ years’ experience conducting clinical trials in primary care, Proxemis is ideally positioned to transform the UK’s approach to primary care research.

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