The greatest challenge we face in the delivery of clinical trials is meeting patient recruitment goals and the diversity targets within them.
The solution may not be what you think – it’s not pushing harder on existing sites or delaying the milestones, but instead, it can actually be bringing more diverse leaders onboard.
Often one of the big, unspoken factors that lead to clinical trials being run in certain countries is simply how comfortable the decision makers are with running clinical trials in those places. It’s not an easily measurable factor, but it has a lot to do with why some countries have an abundance of clinical trials and others don’t.
Bring more diverse leaders
When we appoint people to leadership positions who come from more diverse backgrounds, an organisation’s comfort level increases relative to that leader’s experience with the underrepresented region or population group. We’re able to gain a fuller picture of a previously unfamiliar healthcare system, regulatory framework and geopolitics, and so we become more comfortable directing more clinical trials to that area.
For patients, this means more treatment options, increased quality of life or even increased lifespan.
Clinical trials are an important component of any healthcare system, and in many countries they provide the only chance for the treatment of certain conditions. Yet most clinical trials miss their delivery milestones due to slow patient recruitment in already saturated markets, and trials struggle to deliver diverse patient populations that meet the FDA’s recommendations.
We need diverse clinical research leaders to reach diverse patients.